documents from The Hague Tribunal judgments are displayed in Croatia

Mirko Clarin, founder of the centre and director of the Agency “Sense”, a news agency that followed trials at the ICTY, told BIRN that it would have an archive with media reports on ICTY cases documented for more than 20 years.

We made a selection of the things we wanted to keep. The things we thought could also be used to create interactive sodiums, documentaries, educational movies and so on”, Clarin said.

The key to this centre is to demonstrate the crimes that have been investigated, prosecuted and tried by the tribunal, and also what are the facts that are defined beyond any reasonable suspicion”, he explained.

Clarin, who decided to open the centre in his hometown of Pula, where he also had the support of local administration, said his priority is to show how the Court rebuilt the events of Yugoslav wars.

The “is less important if someone in particular is convicted or not of something, because even in all charges of acquittal, you have confirmation that certain things, declared in the indictment, occurred in a certain way”, he said.

He noted that the facts specified by the ICTY are very little-known to the general public throughout the region, which is interested in whether anyone is innocent or guilty, while paying little attention to these small details as proven evidence and evidence of victim and witnesses”.

Serge Brammertz, ICTY prosecutor and her successor, Mechanism for International Criminal Court, I CYY, will officially open the centre Friday evening.

Brammertz and Clarin will speak at the opening ceremony, along with a cultural heritage protection expert, Helen Walasek and the head of the NGO in Zagreb, Documenta ) The Centre for Facedown with the Past, Vesna Terseliq.

Representatives of the attorney and state prosecutor's office from Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia will also come to the opening ceremony.

An exhibition titled “Monures in Saint” showing the destruction of cultural, historical and religious heritage during the 1990s wars through documentation gathered at the ICTY will be displayed at the same evening.

On Saturday, Brammertz will also be at a panel at a conference on the destruction of cultural heritage, post-war reconstruction and confidence building in the new centre.

The conference is organised by “Sense”, Documenta, NGO Centre for Humanitarian Law Belgrade, the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo and the Paris network of active NGOs for preservation of cultural heritage, Europe Nostra.

On Thursday, Brammertz met with Croatian Justice Minister Drazen Boskovovic and Chief State Prosecutor Dinko Cvitan in Zagreb to discuss Croatia's co-operation with the ICTY and the MICT,