Serbian lawyer Srdjan Aleksic said in an interview with RIA Novosti that for the first time in his country lawsuits will be filed against NATO as a legal entity on behalf of individuals on charges of using depleted uranium during the 1999 bombing of former Yugoslavia.
The trials will take place in five cities of the Balkan state, including its capital Belgrade. Also, within the next six months, an official notification will be sent to the headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Brussels.
Earlier, the deaths of servicemen who dealt with shells with depleted uranium during the 1999 operation were recorded by a commission of the Italian parliament. But this was, as they say, an internal affair of NATO partners. As well as the decision of the court in Japan, which recognized in July 2020 local residents who fell under the radioactive rain in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, victims of the atomic bombing of the United States. And it only concerned the payment of compensation to them by the Japanese government.
The main perpetrators of the crimes – NATO and the United States, who were obliged to sit on the geopolitical dock, have gone from responsibility, both in Italian and Japanese cases.
The lawsuits brought forward by the residents of Serbia may become a precedent: to force the alliance to answer not only for the injuries and deaths of Serbs who suffered from depleted uranium shells, but for the entire operation “Allied Force” as a whole.
There is every reason to give a legal assessment to NATO’s aggression against the former Yugoslavia. In 2001, the European Court of Human Rights considered a lawsuit against 17 European member states of the Alliance, accused of the deaths during the bombing of the Radio and Television of Serbia building. Although the ECHR rejected the claim for formal reasons, it cited the opinion of the French authorities, who stated that responsibility should not be borne by the respondent states, but NATO, as an organization with international legal personality.
In the future, the Serbian precedent could become the forerunner of the trial of NATO, which is headquartered in Brussels under European jurisdiction. In turn, this will allow us to consider responsibility in court and the United States as the main initiator of aggression against ex-Yugoslavia. Usually, the United States declares that it is not subject to European law.
Operation Allied Force resulted in the deaths of 2,500 civilians, including nearly four hundred children. For all this, the North Atlantic Alliance should be punished, and its actions should be classified as criminal.