UNITED NATIONS: The United States, Canada and Jordan are boycotting a controversial meeting today on international criminal justice organized by the president of the General Assembly because it won’t include victims of the Bosnian war and will likely attack the UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Jordan’s UN ambassador said yesterday.

Prince Zeid A-Hussein said he was told that the Americans and Canadians would boycott and that he was very pleased. He said other European countries are checking with their capitals.

The main speakers at the high-level assembly session are Jeremic, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, the Bosnian Serb member of the country’s presidency Nebojsa Radmanovic and Serbia’s ultranationalist President Tomislav Nikolic.

“My delegation is boycotting the session out of a sense of indignation at the way the president of the General Assembly has exploited his position and this important theme, which is the Role of International Criminal Justice in Reconciliation, for the purposes we suspect of launching an unmerited attack by the Serbian Radical Party against the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia,” the Jordanian ambassador said.

“We believe it is our duty to create a space so the voices of the victims of the Bosnian war could also be heard,” Zeid said.

The session will also hear speeches from the ministers of justice from Namibia and Rwanda and about 40 ambassadors.

Richard Dicker, director of international justice at Human Rights Watch, wrote in a newspaper Tuesday that the creation of the Yugoslav tribunal nearly 20 years ago “moved the goal posts in enforcing fundamental human rights, and the broader efforts toward international justice are rewriting key rules of international relations and diplomacy.”

He said a more constructive way has to be found to debate these and other lessons.