C’MON SLOBO, BE A GOOD SPORT

No Rapport with Milosevic (The World ( U.A.E.), November 10th, 2004)

The lawyers appointed to defend Slobodan Milosevic in his war crimes trial renewed their plea yesterday to be allowed to withdraw from the case, saying their relationship with the defendant had been irreparably damaged.

Steven Kay told The Hague Tribunal he and Gillian Higgins could not adequately defend the former Yugoslav president because he refused to cooperate with them after the court appointed them to avoid trial delays due to his ill health.
The lawyers were appointed in September.

Kay said a rapport built up with Milosevic in their earlier role as “friends of the court” to ensure a fair trial was “completely destroyed” after they were formally appointed.

“... As assigned counsel our relationship with this accused has run into the sand and completely deteriorated to the extent that we do not have what existed before,” Kay said.

Kay's appeal was heard by the tribunal a week after Milosevic, 63, was given the right to lead his own defence case following his appeal over the imposition of defence lawyers.

While the court agreed last week to restore Milosevic to a more central role in the trial, which opened in February 2002, it said the lawyers were needed as back-up should the former president's health prevent him from continuing.

For hundreds of years, one of the defining stories in the development of the common law was the struggle for the right to be represented by counsel. Can there be any more proof of the topsy-turvy world of international law than that the most high-profile war crimes trial since World War Two has ground to a halt over the right of the defendant to speak for himself?