Secrecy Leaves Room for Doubt on Srebrenica DNA Evidence

By Andy Wilcoxson
A controversy surrounding DNA identifications made by the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) of victims of the Srebrenica massacre has erupted behind the scenes in the war crimes trial of former Bosnian-Serb President Radovan Karadzic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.
Last month, the ICMP issued a press release which claimed that “By analyzing DNA profiles extracted from bone samples of exhumed mortal remains and matching them to the DNA profiles obtained from blood samples donated by relatives of the missing, the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) has so far revealed the identity of 6,598 persons missing from the July 1995 fall of Srebrenica.”
The ICTY relied heavily on the ICMP’s findings to convict the defendants in the Popovic trial on charges related to Srebrenica. Prosecutors in the Karadzic trial also intend to make use the ICMP’s findings. The Prosecution has announced that it intends to call the ICMP’s Director of Forensic Sciences, Dr. Thomas Parsons, as an expert witness.
On July 23, 2009, Karadzic asked the Trial Chamber to “allow my experts to see every single piece of material, all the DNA analysis” he said, “my experts cannot rely on newspaper information. They need to have the same material that the [Prosecution] experts were privy to in order to be able to see whether the facts were established correctly and whether the conclusions were established correctly. That’s why my experts have to focus on the same body of material that their counterparts had. This is the only way. They must be able to see everything that the [Prosecution] experts saw and then they will be able to confront them with their expert views.”
He explained to the court that “We want the entire material, and we will take a random sample and choose 300, and if there are major discrepancies among the 300, then we will broaden the sample and continue the procedure.”
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