Asks Dan Hannan MEP.
He favours one or other but not ICTY as it is too slow and (he believes) too compromised in different ways.
Here is an earlier (quite good) piece I wrote about ICTY and the regional War Crimes Tribunals in former Yugoslavia.
This Mladic one is just too big for these regional tribunals to handle. ICTY is the best we have, as Balkan Insight describes:
In April 2005, in the case against Radislav Krstic, the Appeals Chamber established that the Srebrenica events legally constituted genocide – the first case to be so defined in Europe since the end of the Second World War.
Several tribunal cases related to Srebrenica have revealed a great deal of new evidence about this crime. So have the plea agreements of two high-ranking Bosnian Serb officers, Dragan Obrenovic and Momir Nikolic.
These provided valuable insight into the mechanics of the massacre (although Nikolic’s reliability as a witness was challenged when it became clear that not all the evidence he gave the prosecutors in his plea negotiations was true). Obrenovic, then deputy commander of Zvornik brigade, provided the closest evidence of a direct link between Mladic and the executions…
The trial of the “Srebrenica seven” that ended in mid 2010- Vujadin Popovic, Ljubisa Beara, Drago Nikolic, Ljubomir Borovcanin, Radivoje Miletic, Milan Gvero and Vinko Pandurevic – further strengthened the evidence base confirming the existence of genocidal intent in the highest circles of the Bosnian Serb Army leadership.
One of the accused, Ljubisa Beara, was identified as a person not only aware of this intent but fully sharing it. Beara was one of Mladic’s closest collaborators at the time.
Puzzles still remain over when and how the decision to execute thousands Bosnian Muslim men in Srebrenica was made and by whom, however.The hope is that this trial, one of the most crucial ever held in the history of the Hague tribunal, will finally answer those questions.
I have a feeling that Mladic will not live long enough to see the outcome.