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Plea bargaining - an ICTY perspective

Sarajevo, 24 April 2012

A two-day conference entitled 'Plea Bargaining - A Tool for Obtaining Information on Mass Graves' opened in Sarajevo on 24 April 2012. The conference gathered together around 40 participants, including members of a regional organisation for the families of those missing since the wars in the former Yugoslavia, as well as local government officials, NGOs, and representatives from the Prosecutor's Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

ICTY Outreach representative Almir Alić gave a twenty-minute multi-media presentation on the practice of plea agreements before the ICTY, including the relevant legal framework, the advantages and disadvantages of such agreements, and details of ICTY cases in which plea agreements were negotiated resulting in information on mass grave sites.

The presentation met with great interest among the representatives of the victims' associations, and the opportunity was used to discuss in more detail guilty pleas as mitigating factors in sentencing before the ICTY.

During the second part of the conference, representatives of the local judiciary and the Balkans Investigative Reporting Network presented their views on the subject.