ABSTRACT
It is not enough that peace enforcement missions have doctrines, mandates and rules of engagement intended to enable them to detain indicted war criminals; these also need to be turned into proper actions to ensure successful detentions. Based on the experience of IFOR, SFOR and KFOR, it is not possible to develop a definitive list of actions likely to secure detentions in all possible circumstances. Even within the same peace enforcement mission every detention operation is unique and there are even more significant differences between one mission to another. However, disseminating recommendable practices on the basis of lessons learned from past missions is still a widely recognised method within international organisations such as the UN and NATO (Lightburn 2001, Lt Gen Silva 1998, NATO 17th February 2003).38 Hence, based on lessons learned from IFOR, SFOR and KFOR, this chapter identifies and discusses some of the actions that peace missions should seriously consider implementing if they want to detain indicted war criminals successfully.
