The EU's Inexcusable Pardon for Serbia

My Crisis Group colleague, Sabine Freizer, and I wrote this piece for the European Voice, which ran it on 29 March 2007.

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Given the widespread negativity about further EU enlargement, it is curious that the EU is poised to lower the bar for Serbia, which Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn said earlier this month could achieve candidate status by 2008.

Indeed, it is more than surprising – downright shocking – that the EU proposes to waive preconditions that the most notorious war criminals in Europe are arrested and transferred to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.

For years, talks with Serbia over a stabilisation and association agreement (SAA) were strictly dependent on Belgrade’s full co-operation with the tribunal and from December 2004 to April 2005 this conditionality bore fruit. Serbia transferred 16 indictees before SAA talks began in May 2005.

But that is precisely when co-operation stopped.