THE HAGUE – The trial of Slobodan Milosevic, former president of Serbia and later of Yugoslavia, will be transmitted live via the internet. The indictment will be read on Tuesday, 3 July. Carla del Ponte, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, will announce more details in a press conference she’s giving this afternoon at 16.00 hours (GMT +02.00).
From the press conference onwards, internet users worldwide will be able to listen to the proceedings of the War Tribunal in The Hague via http://domovina.xs4all.nl.
Domovina Net, founded by Frank Tiggelaar in 1994 to enable Bosnian refugees to find each other, has been streaming the sessions of the Tribunal since july 1998, in English and in Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian.
The internet transmissions are picked up in Prague by Radio Free Europe/Radio Free Liberty and relayed via satellite to a network of short and medium wave groundstations. This way, people in a.o. Banja Luka, Sarajevo, Skopje and Belgrade are able to follow the sessions with normal radios.
XS4ALL sees Domovina Net as an excellent example of using the internet to promote freedom of speech. Thanks to Domovina the inhabitants of the territories of the former Yugoslavia are able to follow the trials of war criminals from their own region.
The transmissions of the tribunal are streamed in two audio-formats; in Real Audio and in the Windows Media format. The streams are delayed by half an hour to enable technicians of the Court to edit for accidental or mistaken content (such as the names of protected witnesses). However, the press conference and reading of the indictment will be streamed live, without delay.
With the generous support of Real Networks, large numbers of internet users world wide will be able to simultaneously listen to these transmissions. Real is offering extra capacity via its Real Impact server network. Real Networks and XS4ALL have joined forces before in supporting the live streams of Radio B92 in Belgrade.
Transmissions: http://domovina.xs4all.nl
