100915ED

Page 14622

1 Wednesday, 15 September 2010

2 [Open session]

3 [The accused entered court]

4 --- Upon commencing at 2.29 p.m.

5 THE REGISTRAR: Good afternoon, Your Honours. Good afternoon

6 everybody in and around the courtroom. This is case IT-08-91-T, the

7 Prosecutor versus Mico Stanisic and Stojan Zupljanin.

8 JUDGE HALL: Thank you, Mr. Registrar.

9 First of all, for the record, I indicate that we convene --

10 reconvene under Rule 15 bis, Judge Harhoff being absent.

11 Good afternoon to everyone. May we have the appearances, please.

12 MR. HANNIS: Good afternoon, Your Honours. I'm Tom Hannis, along

13 with Matthew Olmsted, and Crispian Smith for the Prosecution.

14 MR. ZECEVIC: Good afternoon, Your Honours. Slobodan Zecevic,

15 Slobodan Cvijetic, Eugene O'Sullivan, Ms. Dierdre Montgomery, and Danko

16 Kostovic, appearing for Stanisic Defence this afternoon. Thank you.

17 MR. KRGOVIC: Good afternoon, Your Honours. Dragan Krgovic, Igor

18 Pantelic, and Aleksandar Aleksic for Zupljanin Defence.

19 JUDGE HALL: Thank you.

20 The Chamber has one housekeeping matter before we continue with

21 the witness.

22 [Trial Chamber and Legal Officer confer]

23 JUDGE HALL: Yesterday the Office of the Prosecution filed a

24 motion to amend its 65 ter list to reinstate a document, and the -- it

25 would be useful if the Defence would indicate if -- if they could

Page 14623

1 indicate orally whether they have an objection. If not, we would request

2 your response by day after tomorrow, Friday.

3 MR. ZECEVIC: I'm afraid, Your Honours, that we are not in a

4 position to state our position at this moment. But if Your Honours will

5 indulge us, during the course of the day we would be able to give you our

6 position.

7 JUDGE HALL: And I suppose Mr. Krgovic says the same thing.

8 MR. KRGOVIC: [Microphone not activated].

9 JUDGE HALL: Are there any other matters that we need ...

10 MR. PLAVEC: [Interpretation] Your Honours, as the counsel for the

11 witness, I would like to ask something of the Chamber.

12 Yesterday the witness felt a strong stab of pain in his cervical

13 vertebra and he thinks this was because he was sitting for an extended

14 period of time. He believes that he will not be able to sit for five

15 hours, and he believes that he would be able to take four hours of

16 sitting down, and we would therefore kindly ask the sitting hours to be

17 curtailed by one hour.

18 JUDGE HALL: Thank you. We have been alerted to that request

19 being made, and we agree. We are going to work out the exact time that

20 we would rise, but you may assure your client that we will -- that

21 today's schedule will accommodate him in that regard.

22 So it -- we will see how the -- what progress we make, and the

23 question is whether we would sit for a portion of what would ordinarily

24 have been the third session, or whether it would be -- the practical

25 course would be to vacate that session entirely. But we will see how we

Page 14676

1 and they are not familiar with -- with its own case, Your Honours.

2 This is a -- this is a serious violation of the rights of the

3 accused, this way, this practice. Because with regard to my client,

4 Mr. Zupljanin, they filed indictment in 1999, 11 years ago, and, finally,

5 this trial started in September last year, where everyone could, I said,

6 accept that Office of the Prosecution is ready for trial and know what

7 its case is. And this unacceptable practice must stop, Your Honour.

8 That's why we strongly object to -- with regard to the admission of this

9 particular document.

10 And in addition to that, Your Honour, I don't know who the author

11 of this particular motion was, but maybe he or she was not informed. I'm

12 referring to the page 2 of this motion. There is some explanation that

13 in relation to previous Exhibit P668, this particular document will give

14 the Chamber a greater insight into the accused Zupljanin's authority in

15 relation to local war president. This is completely ungrounded and

16 completely misunderstanding of this particular motion, and in addition to

17 that, these kinds of submissions should be addressed for the final

18 submission not to use it during the course of the trial.

19 So for all these reasons, Your Honours, I am completely -- I

20 strongly object to this -- to this -- to admission of this document,

21 because it is a clear example of the lack of diligence on the part of the

22 OTP. We have Rules here, we have a framework of our activities here, and

23 this is really not along the lines with these standards.

24 Thank you.

25 JUDGE HALL: So the sermonette that you just treated us to

Page 14677

1 indicates your -- your position on this, or do you intend to file a

2 written response?

3 MR. PANTELIC: No, no, I'm absolutely comfortable with the oral

4 response and we are objecting to the admission of this document on this

5 basis.

6 JUDGE HALL: Thank you. So noted.

7 MS. KORNER: All can I say to that is --

8 JUDGE HALL: We weren't inviting a response, Ms. Korner.

9 MS. KORNER: No you weren't, but I'm applying, I suppose, as

10 they're not putting in a written response to which we would have a right

11 to ask for a response to the response. I simply want to say this,

12 Your Honour, in one sentence: In Mr. Pantelic's sermon, as I think

13 Your Honour called it, although that's come out as something different in

14 the LiveNote, he actually failed to point to any prejudice that the

15 Defence can suffer from this. They have had this document for months,

16 we've explained how it's come about, that it was removed, and we say its

17 probative value far outweighs any prejudice.

18 But Your Honours, actually what I wanted to deal with, I'm

19 afraid, are a number of really rather urgent administrative matters,

20 particularly in light of Your Honours' and indeed Your Honours' staff

21 absence next week.

22 Your Honours, can I just say straight away, strangely enough,

23 after a year of trial, the anniversary being yesterday, we are reaching

24 the end of the Prosecution case. Our estimate with the present new

25 witnesses is that we will finish the Prosecution case mid-November,

Page 14678

1 roughly about seven weeks. Your Honour, there are still -- and I'm

2 sorry, I know this is the drum I keep beating, but a large number of

3 important outstanding decisions for Your Honours to make on motions from

4 both sides.

5 The first is this, and that is you haven't yet ruled as to

6 whether Ewan Brown may be treated as an expert. We filed an application

7 way back last year for a number of people, and Your Honours' rulings have

8 come effectively just before the witness testifies. Mr. Brown, there

9 are difficulties with him. He no longer works at the Office of the

10 Prosecutor. He is self-employed, and he has undertaken a long contract

11 which is going to last three months which starts next week. Now, he has

12 very kindly agreed, as we understand it - we're still awaiting the final

13 confirmation because it's a contract that will take him out of Europe -

14 that he can testify the week of the 18th of October, which is not that

15 far away. So we need to know whether he will be treated as an expert

16 because it depends on whether his report goes in and all of that.

17 Second matter is this, which is linked: We applied --

18 Your Honours said that we could only apply to add the Mladic notebooks to

19 our 65 ter list and not have them exhibited, or we said that's what we

20 were planning to do. We actually applied to do that on a 18th of May.

21 You came back to us on the 29th of June and said only specific entries as

22 opposed to all the notebooks, which we supplied on the 13th of July, the

23 excerpts that we wish to have entered as exhibits. And we have not had a

24 ruling on that and we do really need a ruling. It affects, or may

25 affect, Mr. Brown's evidence.

Page 14679

1 In addition to that, Your Honours, we asked whether the Defence

2 were still maintaining their challenge to the authenticity. They said

3 they were, in which case we said we needed to add to our list two

4 witnesses who dealt with the authenticity. So that needs to be dealt

5 with.

6 Your Honour, we are disclosing -- we're going to, in fact, today

7 give the Defence a spreadsheet which contains a summary of what is on all

8 the tapes, the audio and videotapes, which is being done by the OTP.

9 Mr. Zecevic raised this in the absence of both Mr. Hannis and myself, I

10 think, on the 2nd of September, and said that he was going to be applying

11 for an adjournment. We have decided, because we part-disclosed the tapes

12 already, the remaining tapes we will disclose but we are saying that none

13 of them -- not none of them, I think maybe three or four could be said to

14 have any relevance to this case at all. They deal, in the main, with

15 what seems to have happened either in Croatia in 1991 or well beyond the

16 scope of this indictment. And to assist the Defence, we've given them

17 the spreadsheet. And so obviously we would be saying we object to any

18 adjournment, that -- for the basis of examining these tapes because we

19 say they are utterly and wholly irrelevant as will be seen from our

20 summary of what's on the tapes.

21 Your Honour, the other matter is there are -- we put in an

22 application to call two further witnesses on the 8th of July to deal not

23 with adjudicated facts that Your Honours had struck out or in some way

24 altered but to deal specifically with Defence challenges. And the

25 Defence responded to that, and we put in a response to the response on

Page 14680

1 the 27th of July. Again, for purposes of timing, we do need to have a

2 ruling on those two witnesses who are named there ST-041 and ST-055. As

3 I say, they are specifically to deal with Defence challenges to

4 adjudicated facts.

5 And those, Your Honours are the administrative matters which I

6 wish to draw to your attention.

7 JUDGE HALL: Thank you, Ms. Korner. The only thing I would say

8 now is that the last item you mentioned, you could expect that ruling

9 imminently.

10 MS. KORNER: Well, I'm grateful for that, but as I say, all the

11 ones that I have mentioned, not to mention the other ones --

12 JUDGE HALL: Yes, we haven't lost sight of that. It's just that

13 because of our familiarity, recent familiarity with that, I -- I -- I can

14 assure you that that one is -- you could expect very soon.

15 [Trial Chamber and Legal Officer confer]

16 JUDGE DELVOIE: Which doesn't mean, Ms. Korner, that the other

17 ones you cannot expect very soon, it's just that we remember this one

18 very well for the moment, but there are other ones to come as well.

19 JUDGE HALL: [Microphone not activated] I believe we are in

20 Courtroom I tomorrow. Yes.

21 --- Whereupon the hearing adjourned at 5.45 p.m.,

22 to be reconvened on Thursday, the 16th day of

23 September, 2010, at 9.00 a.m.