PAUL KNOX
Tuesday, July
17, 2001 – Print Edition, Page A10 , http://www.globeandmail.com/
A few days after Slobodan Milosevic appeared before a war-crimes court
in The Hague this month, he asked his jailers to arrange a visit by a
Canadian lawyer.
The request thrust 51-year-old Christopher Black under a global
spotlight as chief legal adviser to one of the world's most notorious
accused war criminals.
Far from being embarrassed, Mr. Black says he's eager to do what he can
for the former Yugoslav president.
"This man is being railroaded for political reasons . . .," he said
from his home in Richmond Hill, Ont. "I have seen no evidence that he,
from a command responsibility point of view, is guilty of anything."
Mr. Black, a veteran criminal lawyer who ran in the last federal
election as a candidate for the Communist Party of Canada, spent two hours
with Mr. Milosevic, laying out his legal options.
Those included a challenge in the Dutch courts to the legitimacy of the
United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia,
which is trying Mr. Milosevic on charges of crimes against humanity.
The two men first met in Belgrade last March after Yugoslav authorities
arrested the former president on domestic corruption charges. Mr. Black
heads the legal arm of an international committee set up to defend Mr.
Milosevic.
While most Canadians associated with the ICTY are working for the court
or as prosecutors, Mr. Black maintains that the UN-sanctioned tribunal is
illegal under international law.
He has attacked Madame Justice Louise Arbour of the Supreme Court of
Canada for issuing the indictment of Mr. Milosevic in May, 1999, when she
was the ICTY's chief prosecutor. It bolstered flagging support for the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization's bombing of Yugoslavia, he said.
Mr. Black was one of several Canadian lawyers who sought unsuccessfully
to have Judge Arbour or her successor, Carla del Ponte of Switzerland,
bring war-crimes charges against NATO leaders, including Prime Minister
Jean Chrétien.
He said he was disappointed in Judge Arbour, who taught him criminal
law at Toronto's Osgoode Hall Law School in the 1970s.
"We all thought that she would have enough integrity to do something,"
he said.
Mr. Black is already defending another accused war criminal facing
charges of genocide at a parallel UN tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania.
Long a supporter of leftist causes, Mr. Black joined the Communist
Party of Canada in 1998 after becoming convinced the West was determined
to crush Mr. Milosevic's Yugoslavia. "It was the only party that took a
principled position on developments in the Balkans," he said.
People's Voice, the party newspaper, published his poem Smiling
Carnivores, which described Canadian political and business figures as
"wasteland dogs, with snouts full of blood and torment . . . a pack of
flunkies and well-paid hoodlums."
Because of his knowledge of the Balkans, the party chose Mr. Black to
run in last year's election in Toronto's York Centre riding, pitting him
against Defence Minister Art Eggleton, who oversaw Canada's participation
in the NATO campaign.
Mr. Black polled 161 votes to Mr. Eggleton's 24,537. He said he missed
most of the campaign because of the pressure of the work and because he
contracted malaria while in Arusha.
Because Mr. Milosevic does not recognize the tribunal, Mr. Black is
acting only as legal adviser to the former president and paying his own
expenses. But Mr. Black said Serbs living in Canada and elsewhere are
trying to raise funds to help cover his costs and those of other lawyers.
So far, he hasn't received anything.
Mr. Milosevic was expansive when they met, he said -- offering him
cigarettes, reviewing the past 10 decades of Balkan history and denying
the charges against him.
Mr. Milosevic told him that every Yugoslav soldier carried a card
laying out his responsibilities under the Geneva conventions, and added
that 500 troops were arrested for violating regulations.
"The Americans never did that in Vietnam," Mr. Black quoted the former
Yugoslav leader as saying.
Mr. Black said he is against all international efforts to try former
leaders -- even right-wingers such as former Chilean military dictator
Augusto Pinochet -- because global politics will always determine who is
brought to justice.
"They should be tried by their own people in their own countries," he
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