Lawyers not only from Serbia but also Germany, France, Italy, Russia, China, Britain and Turkey will form part of the team suing for material and non-material damage inflicted on individual citizens. The team of experts will be led by legal expert Srdjan Aleksic.
In the course of the bombing campaign, NATO launched 2 300 missiles at almost 1 000 targets and dropped 14 000 bombs, including depleted uranium bombs and cluster munitions.
More than 2 000 civilians were killed, including 88 children, and thousands more were injured while some 200 000 ethnic Serbs were forced to leave their homes in Kosovo.
“We will sue NATO member-states, participants in the 1999 aggression on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the 20 countries that directly or indirectly took part in the aggression. The lawsuits will be filed against individual member-states of the alliance,” Aleksic explained to Sputnik News.
In March 1999, NATO launched an aerial bombing campaign not authorized by the UN Security Council, violating international law.
But Vice President of the International Association of Russian-Speaking Lawyers, Mikhail Ioffe, told Sputnik that Serbia should have filed the lawsuits immediately after the 1999 bombings. He nevertheless described the law suit as “viable”.
“From a legal standpoint, they should have brought the charges when the damage [caused by the airstrikes] was there for everyone to see, not now that its traces are no longer evident. Still, the damage they caused to the people’s health is hard to miss,” Ioffe said.
According to Ioffe, a number of legal issues would be hard to resolve. “The question is whether the US will respond to these charges or not. The other countries could likewise want to shirk responsibility for what they did. The biggest hurdle is that [the 1999 bombings] have not been recognized as an international aggression by any authoritative international body,” the lawyer stated.
“The UN refused to authorize them, but neither did they term the actions by the US and its coalition partners as an act of aggression,” Ioffe concluded.
NATO launched air strikes in Serbia on March 24, 1999, without the backing of the UN Security Council. Codenamed “Operation Allied Force,”’ it was the largest attack ever undertaken and the first time ever that NATO used military force without the approval of the UN Security Council and against a sovereign nation that did not pose a threat to any member of the alliance.
The UN has meanwhile stepped up its demands for the extradition of three members of the Serbian Radical Party, but Belgrade officials responded by saying that the case is closed.
After the president of the Hague war crimes tribunal this week asked the UN Security Council to push Belgrade into finally arresting members of the nationalist Serbian Radical Party, the Serbian Justice Ministry repeated on Thursday that a Belgrade court has ruled not to extradite them.
“The [Justice] Ministry forwarded the received documents to the Higher Court in Belgrade – War Crimes Department. This court delivered an opinion in mid-October 2016 that in this specific case there are no grounds for taking action in the jurisdiction of the court bearing in mind the final and enforceable decision of the Higher Court in Belgrade – War Crimes Department in May 2016,” the ministry told BIRN in a written response.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia is due to shut down at the end of 2017.