By Louis Charbonneau
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United States boycotted as "inflammatory" a meeting on international justice on Wednesday organized by a Serbian politician who heads the U.N. General Assembly - a session some nations say was intended merely to complain about the treatment of Serbs in war crimes tribunals.
The meeting and panel discussion were set up by former Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic, who is serving as president of the 193-nation assembly. Some U.N. diplomats have privately accused Jeremic of using the General Assembly to promote his own career and his home country.
European and other Western nations have said Wednesday's session on international justice was a thinly veiled attempt to attack the international war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which Serbia has criticized. Jordan and Canada joined the United States in boycotting the debate.
"The United States strongly disagrees with the decision of the president of the General Assembly to hold an unbalanced, inflammatory thematic debate today on the role of international criminal justice in reconciliation and will not participate," said Erin Pelton, spokeswoman for the U.S. mission to the United Nations.
"We believe that ad hoc international criminal tribunals and other judicial institutions in Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone and Cambodia have been critical to ending impunity and helping these countries chart a new, more positive future," Pelton said in a statement.
Pelton added that it was especially problematic that the day's events "fail to provide the victims of these atrocities an appropriate voice."
A senior Western diplomat said on condition of anonymity that Jeremic's decision to organize the meeting on April 10 - the day that Croatia's Nazi puppet state was established in 1941 - ensured that the "whole event took on a Serbian feel."
He added that Jeremic had refused to change the date after he was requested to do so by a number of delegations.
'ALMOST AN IMPEACHABLE OFFENSE'
Jordan's U.N. Ambassador Prince Zeid Ra'ad Zeid al-Hussein told a small group of reporters that Serbia's approach to the session on international justice was "almost an impeachable offense" - ostensibly referring to Jeremic's largely ceremonial post as the head of the General Assembly.
Since it was set up in 1993, the war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has indicted 161 people for crimes stemming from the wars that shattered the Yugoslav federation, of whom 15 have been acquitted. Several dozen suspects remain on trial.
Serbia and its ally Russia have sharply criticized the tribunal over recent decisions to free two Croatian generals and a Kosovo Albanian former guerilla commander.
Jeremic did not explicitly attack the Hague war crimes tribunals in his speech, though he told the assembly that international justice could be misused in a way that prevents reconciliation between former adversaries.
"Such outcomes would harm efforts to strengthen the rule of law, for no legal tradition recognizes the guilt or innocence of an entire nation," he said.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon defended the war crimes tribunals, the International Criminal Court (ICC) and other methods of ensuring accountability.
"The system of international criminal justice has ... given voice to victims and witnesses," Ban said.
Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic hammered away at the Hague tribunal in a roughly 45-minute speech to the assembly, telling participants that the "prosecution has been favored over the defense" and the court was guilty of the "most flagrant violation of human rights."
Richard Dicker of Human Rights Watch said Nikolic is well known as a denier of the Srebrenica genocide. More than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in July 1995 by Bosnian Serb forces under the command of Ratko Mladic, who is currently on trial for crimes against humanity and other war crimes.
Jordan, Britain and others complained that the victims of Srebrenica had no voice in Wednesday's debate.
Croatian Ambassador Ranko Vilovic also criticized the session, saying "truth, justice and reconciliation were not the values for which this debate was organized."
Some diplomats say Jeremic may be jostling to become the next president of Serbia. If he does not get Serbia's presidency, he is likely to try to become the next U.N. secretary-general, a position that is expected to be filled by an Eastern European, envoys say.
U.N. diplomats say Jeremic's name has been mentioned as a possible candidate to replace Ban after his term ends in December 2016. While Russia would support Jeremic, U.N. diplomats said there are less divisive candidates from Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and elsewhere.
The European Union's 27 member nations are attending the event but sending junior diplomats.
(Reporting by Louis Charbonneau; Editing by Will Dunham)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/u-others-boycott-serbian-politicians-inflammatory-u-n-173529221.html
whitney houston national anthem beverly hills hotel beverly hills hotel the watchmen whitney houston dies dolly parton i will always love you beverly hilton hotel
I field this question every day. ?My response is always the same, it depends. ?So, when should someone consider a Trust-based estate plan*? ?Well, here are a few things to consider:
Docstoc, the online store for high-quality professional and business documents that made its debut at the TechCrunch40 conference back in 2007, today announced that it has partnered with Microsoft to sell its content directly to Microsoft Office users from within the Office applications. When Office users search for templates, they will now encounter Docstoc as a provider and can start the purchasing process from right inside Office. Currently, as Docstoc co-founder and CTO Alon Shwartz tells us, 10 Docstoc templates are available in Microsoft’s library (Partnership Agreement, Promissory Note, Resignation Letters, Power of Attorney, Buy-Sell Agreement, Independent Contractor Agreement, Employee Confidentiality Agreement, Offer to Purchase Real Estate, Contract for Sale of Goods and Non-disclosure Agreement). All of them retail for $24.95. In addition, Docstoc has also built an Office 365 and Office 2013 application that gives users direct access to all of the documents in the company’s library. As Docstoc notes, this partnership “aims to be a cost-effective option for entrepreneurs, startups and small businesses alike, who often lack the funds to buy the needed software.” Shwartz also told us that Microsoft chose to partner with his company because it believes “that the combination of our existing winning technology, high-quality content, deep understanding of the market, and successful experience with monetization of content is the best recipe for success.” Docstoc has more than 25 million registered users and has created over 12,000 templates and forms since its launch in 2007 (and there are millions of additional documents available on the service, too). Docstoc offers free and paid memberships, as well as the option to buy one-off documents on demand.
Educational platform?Treehouse?is announcing today that it has raised $7 million in Series B financing from Kaplan Ventures, with participation from its existing investor, The Social+Capital Partnership.?The round follows the $600K in seed financing it raised in October 2011 from Kevin Rose, Reid Hoffman, David Sze and Mark Suster, among others, which was followed by its $4.75 million Series A in April of last year. Treehouse has raised more than $12 million to date. Treehouse launched in late 2011 on an ambitious mission: To help anyone learn to code and design for iOS, Android and the web, regardless of their technical know-how. By combining the video-based approach of Lynda.com and learn-to-code platforms like Codecademy, Treehouse aimed to create an educational platform that leverages video, quizzes, a splash of gamification and project-based learning to help aspiring app developers and engineers learn the trade. By charging students between $29 and $49 for access to its library of video content, realtime practice engine, in-depth interviews with experts and workshops, Treehouse was quick to reach profitability, and by September, more than 12,000 people (ages 7 to 50) were paying for its platform. Since then, its user base has grown to more than 25,000 active students. In conjunction with its new capital, the startup is also announcing today that it is in the process of launching its first high school pilot program, which aims to train high school seniors to be job-ready for engineering positions without needing a university degree. The program will run for six months and cost $9/month, per student. Treehouse’s move into high school follows on the heels of its “College Scholarship Program,” announced last fall, in which it offered 5,000 “Gold” accounts to college students in the U.S. for free — for a full two years. Because Gold plans typically run $50/month, this worked out to $3 million worth of free Treehouse education — the equivalent of what students would have had to pay out of pocket. Treehouse Founder and CEO Ryan Carson told us at the time its motivation was, essentially, a response to the absurd cost of higher education — a cost that is expected to continue rising. To combat this unsustainable cost, Treehouse set out to offer students of all ages a comparable quality of education, without those costly student loans. The startup’s push to reach both high school and college students is part of its effort to
