Struggle against imputiny

At the time of his death in March 2006, Slobodan Milošević had been on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (the ICTY) for more than four years. Greeted initially as a victory in the ‘struggle against impunity’, the progress of his trial was soon hindered by thickets of procedural argument and by the cunning of Milošević himself. Diverting attention from events in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo – the subject of his trial – Milošević manipulated every legal avenue available to him, giving the impression that, like the farcical and chaotic litigation in William Gaddis’s A Frolic of his Own (1994), the trial was meaningless, ultimately ‘about itself’.

Gideon Boas (now a legal academic at Monash University) was the Senior Legal Officer to the presiding judges on the Milosević trial, and was present in the courtroom for much of it. He witnessed at close hand Milošević’s attempts to subvert the proceedings and the judges’ efforts to rein him in. But his book is not a memoir of the inner workings of the Tribunal or an account of the courtroom theatrics. The Milošević Trial is a scholarly and sometimes dense account – based on Boas’s PhD thesis – of the aspects of criminal procedure that attained pivotal importance to the conduct of the trial.