"When it has already been decided who is the guilty party, the next step is to set up an ad hoc tribunal to formalize this as a court ruling,” Goran Petronijevic, who was a legal adviser to former President of the Republika Srpska Radovan Karadzic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the Hague, said.
He added that all tribunals established to prosecute an individual case are illegal, starting with the ICTY and ending with the tribunal on the downing of flight MH17.
"Consistent application of international law and the preservation of international legal order should not be based on temporary, ad-hoc tribunals," he said.
An international tribunal to investigate last summer’s Malaysia Airlines MH17 flight crash in eastern Ukraine, if established, would become a NATO punitive mechanism, not an independent judicial body, a prominent international lawyer said.
Last Wednesday, Russia blocked a draft UN Security Council resolution on the creation of an international tribunal to prosecute the perpetrators of the aircraft downing. A total of 11 out of the 15 UNSC member-states supported the draft resolution.
“The tribunal on the investigation of the Malaysian Boeing crash in [eastern] Ukraine will be another entity in a sequence of NATO disciplinary bodies, but not an independent judicial body in any way,” Goran Petronijevic told Sputnik.
The main purpose of this tribunal is, undoubtedly, to conceal the real culprits and shift the blame onto the Donbas militia and Russia, the lawyer added.
The Malaysia Airline flight MH17 was downed in eastern Ukraine in 2014 in a false-flag attack that Washington has experience in successfully using globally, Goran Petronijevic said.
“The ‘false-flag’ terrorist strategy, which the US has successfully applied for many years in different countries, was apparently used in the crash of the Malaysian airliner,” Goran Petronijevic said.
The lawyer noted that this strategy is designed to deceive people into blaming the wrong side in a conflict for an attack on a friendly target at an opportune time. He added that false-flag operations are a signature US tactic that have been used in the former Yugoslavia, as well as across North Africa and the Middle East.
