The United States on Wednesday led a boycott of a UN General Assembly meeting that critics slammed as an attempt by Serbia to attack verdicts on its role in the 1990s Balkan wars.
Washington said the meeting on international justice, convened by the UN Assembly's Serbian president, Vuk Jeremic, was "unbalanced" and "inflammatory."
Other countries including Canada also stayed away from the event where Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic said there was a near systematic "lynch-mobbing" of Serbian defendants at international courts.
European nations only sent low-ranking diplomats or officials to the gathering, which was moved away from the main UN General Assembly chamber.
Jeremic, a former Serbian foreign minister, called the meeting after the appeals chamber of the UN's International Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) acquitted two Croatian generals accused of atrocities against Serbs.
The date of the meeting coincides with the sensitive 71st anniversary of the founding of the Croatian pro-Nazi state and several speakers have denied that the 1995 Srebenica massacre was a genocide.
Jeremic refused to let the Mothers of Srebrenica group, representing families of the 8,000 Muslim men and boys killed in the massacre, take part, diplomats said.
He also rejected several appeals by Western nations to change the meeting's date and format.
"I firmly believe there should be no forbidden subjects in the General Assembly," Jeremic said at the start of the gathering.
But Erin Pelton, spokeswoman for the US mission to the United Nations, said: "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."
The international tribunals for 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 added.
"We regret in particular that the way today's thematic debate and the related panel discussion are structured fail to provide the victims of these atrocities an appropriate voice."
The heads of the international tribunals and several top UN legal officials refused to take part. However, UN leader Ban Ki-moon spoke at the meeting and strongly defended the growing role of international justice.
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