NEXT WEEK: Six War Crimes Trials

Twenty indictees will appear before the War Crimes Chamber judges in the last week of November 2006.

The defence of Dragan Damjanovic will begin presenting evidence and questioning the first witnesses on Monday, November 27 and Tuesday, November 28.
 
Branislav Kutlaca and Ognjen Sikiras will appear first.  The defence originally planned to call five witnesses, but they have still not received confirmation that the other three want to testify before the Court.
 
Dragan Damjanovic is charged with war crimes committed against civilians, all of whom lived in the Sarajevo municipality of Vogosca between 1992 and 1993.
 
Presentation of evidence at the trial of Goran and Zoran Damjanovic will begin on the same day and continued on Tuesday, November 28 and Wednesday, November29.
 
Defense attorneys decided to first present defence evidence for Goran Damjanovic, who is charged with war crimes and with keeping significant amounts of weapons and ammunition in his house, which is illegal.

According to the indictment, on June 2, 1992 indictees Goran and Zoran Damjanovic, as members of the army of Republika Srpska and jointly with other soldiers, participated in the beating of a group of around 20 to 30 detained Bosniak men. 

The defence will begin presenting evidence for Zoran Damjanovic next Monday, December 1. 

The renewed procedure against Nedjo Samardzic, taking place before the Appellate Council, will be in process all five days of next week. 

After both sides in the procedure appealed, at the beginning of October the Appellate Council made a decision to renew the process against Nedjo Samardzic. 

 In the first instance verdict, which was announced at the beginning of April 2006, Samardzic was sentenced to 13 years and four months in prison for crimes committed in Foca.  He was also convicted for rapes, murders,expulsion and abuse of Bosniaks. 

After both sides appealed, the Appellate Council decided that during the procedure which took place before the first instance Trial Chamber, “the factual status was not correctly determined” and they decided to repeat the hearing. Playing of audio records of most witnesses’ testimonies is in process. 

On Tuesday, November 28, the defence of Nikola Andrun should finish presenting its evidence. The defence announced presentation of physical evidence,including written documents in which the statements in the indictment are denied. 

The state prosecution holds Andrun responsible for crimes against detained Bosniaks as former deputy warden of the Gabela detention camp located near Capljina. The camp was formed by Croat Defence Council in 1993. The defence denies the charges and maintains that their defendant was a guard in the camp, rather than its deputy warden.     

After being postponed twice due to the illness of a prosecutor, a new status conference before the trial of Zeljko Mejakic, Momcilo Gruban, Dusan Fustar and Dusko Knezevic is scheduled for November 29. 
 
At the last conference the Prosecution asked the Court to state its position on accepting facts already established before the Hague Tribunal, to which the defence objected.
 
The court of BiH confirmed the modified indictment against the four in July, which charges them with crimes committed detention camps in Prijedor in 1992. On May 9 all four were transferred from the detention unit of the International Crime Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to Sarajevo.
 
Next week, from Wednesday to Friday, the Prosecution will continue presenting evidence against 11 indictees charged with genocide committed against Bosniaks in July 1995 in the village of Kravica, which is close to Srebrenica.
 
The Prosecution started reading testimonies given by two experts before ICTY about the results of an investigation into the suffering of Srebrenica inhabitants after the fall of the UN protected enclave.