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36 Colum. J. Transnat'l L. 723 (1998)
Rule 61: The Voice of the Victims Screams Out for Justice

handle is hein.journals/cjtl36 and id is 729 raw text is: Rule 61: The Voice of the Victims Screams Out For Justice Although the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has been operating for almost five years and has indicted over seventy-five war criminals, only one war criminal has been fully tried and only twenty indictees are currently in Tribunal custody. Moreover, the most notorious war criminals, Radovan Karadzic and Radko Mladic, remain at-large. Anticipating this problematic situation when the Tribunal was created, the drafters of the ICTY created a procedure entitled Rule 61. The Rule 61 procedure would enable the ICTY to issue an international arrest warrant against the accused as well as to compile a public record of an alleged war criminal's involvement in the atrocities without conducting a highly controversial trial in absentia. This Note traces the evolution of the Rule 61 procedure. First, the Note discusses the creation of the ICTY and the provisions that were enacted to place an obligation on the international community to bring the accused to justice. The Note then examines the operation of the Rule 61 proceedings and how the Rule 61 procedure was crafted as a compromise to avoid conducting trials in absentia when the ICTY is unable to acquire custody of the accused. Next, the Note discusses that while the Rule 61 procedure represents an interesting solution to the problem of the absent defen- dant, invoking the Rule transforms the Tribunal's main function of acting as a justice-rendering institution into serving as a fact-finding body more akin to a truth commis- sion. This transformation creates a disincentive on the part of the international community to arrest suspected war criminals and bring them to the Hague for trial. The Note concludes that acquiring the accused, putting him on trial, and rendering judgment is the only way to achieve justice for the victims of the Yugoslavian conflict.

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