>> One of the main challenges of international criminal justice
is the remoteness from local communities.
How can some of this remoteness be breached
through cooperation with domestic jurisdictions?
>> Our tribunal is in existence for more than 20 years.
And one of the advantages is that we have
over the years developed a very strong interaction with our colleagues.
As you know in 2004 [COUGH] the Security Council has decided about the Completion
strategy.
Meaning that since 2004, there are no new indictments, and
that we have been asked to transfer remaining cases and
investigations to the countries in the region.
This forced very much the office of the prosecutor to establish bridges
of cooperation.
Cooperation in which in the early years, as I mentioned earlier,
was very difficult.
Because at the first years after the conflict, no fugitives were arrested and
countries were reluctant to cooperate with the tribunal.
Over the years, this has very much changed.
I took over myself in 2008.
And my first mission was to the region to meet with all walk-in
prosecutor from Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia, etc.
And ask them, well what can we do to help you?
And the now, one question was access to your information, access to your databases
but we don't have the budget to send every week our investigators to.
So we looked into two ways.
One, remote electronic access to our OTP databases.
We have more than 10 million pages of documents.
The largest part of this is available electronically for
workers prosecutions offices in the region.
And thanks to a project financed by the European Commission, we have liaison
prosecutors integrated from Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia into our office.
And the last six months alone, they have copied more than 100,000
pages of documents, out of our databases to be used in national proceedings.
It has this huge advantage that once our tribunal is closing,
well, the work will continue in the region.
And I think this will be one of the big challenges for
the international criminal court.
I was, some time ago, at a press conference with
Fatou Bensouda and I remember I got this question.
Well, the ICC is there forever, but
your tribunal will close soon, so you have the completion strategy.
So what you say, Mr.?
And I said, well It is true that we have the completion strategy but
the challenge for
the ICC is that ICC will need a completion strategy for each individual situation.
So far many situations have been opened but it is difficult to close one.
And our experience in our tribunal history,
well If you have the possibility, you know there must be a political will.
You need the time, you need the resources.
If there's a possibility to really establish links between the international
level and the national level, you create really,
the best conditions to have to address in a comprehensive way, the impunity gap.
And this will be, I think, one of the challenges for the future.
To find bridges between international prosecutions and national prosecutions
because I think one of the experiences of all the international tribunals is that
we can only deal with a very small part of the crimes committed.
And as long as there's not a mechanism at the domestic level to deal with
the highest number of cases, well,
international justice is only partially successful.