fairness of the procedures. The views about the fairness of the decisions have an independent
effect on the respondents’ views about the ICTY’s fairness in general even when the political
scale is entered into the model. On the other hand, the independent effect of the punishment
purpose and the timing of the survey becomes only marginally significant once the political scale is
entered into the model (Model 3, Table 8). Finally, the age effect has changed in direction: now
the youngest respondents were more likely to say that the ICTY is unfair than the oldest
respondents were.
Conclusion
The ICTY, a temporary transnational institution empowered to try those accused of engaging in
severe violations of the international law committed on the territory of the former Yugoslavia
since 1991, together with its sister tribunal for Rwanda, ICTR, serves as a direct predecessor to
the permanent International Criminal Court. The victims of the war crimes tried at the ICTY may
be too numerous to be included in the proceedings and thus lack standing before the ICTY. Is it
realistic to expect that the victims who have no standing before the court will accept its decisions?
How the victims judge the fairness of the ICTY, ICTR, and ICC will determine the
legitimacy they attribute to the institutions themselves. As prior research has indicated, relying on
fair decision-making processes is crucial for the development, maintenance, and enhancement of
legitimacy of social institutions (see Tyler, 2000). These issues are of paramount importance for
the promulgation of new legal institutions, such as the ICC, that do not have a long history of
developing the base of widespread legitimacy nor the other parts of the same government to help
them in the process.
Over the eight-year period considered in our research, our respondents—the victims of
war crimes committed on the territory of the former Yugoslavia—show an increasing level of
dissatisfaction with the ICTY. With the passage of time, they are less likely to pick the ICTY as
the appropriate decision-maker for these crimes and less likely to view it as fair. They are
becoming more convinced that the ICTY is lacking neutrality and that it is a political institution,
while, at the same time, they also think that local courts are gaining more independence from the
political influence.
Simply put, the perceptions of the ICTY’s fairness have worsened significantly over time.
While the overwhelming majority of the respondents surveyed in 2000 or earlier thought that the
ICTY is fair, less than one-half of the respondents in the post-2000 surveys thought the same.
Convention