The letter reproduced below, written by forensic anthropologist C. E. Moore II, who took part in the work of forensic exhumations teams sent to the Srebrenica area by ICTY Office of Prosecutor in 1996, is an important and revealing document. Our own analysis of ICTY’s Srebrenica forensic work has disclosed numerous problems which cast serious doubt on the overall reliability of the results and therefore on the validity of court decisions that were based uncritically on such dubious data. Our critique is bolstered by Dr. Moore’s impressions, which paint a devastating picture of the unprofessional procedures employed in the field. It is reasonable to conclude that the results of such sloppily conducted field work cannot be significantly better than the methods that were used to obtain them.

As a result of critical comments leveled not just by Dr. Moore but also by other participating forensic experts on the ICTY Office of the Prosecutor teams working in the Srebrenica area, a commission was set up in 1997 to examine these issues and to make appropriate recommendations. The commission was convened in San Antonio, Texas, hence its conclusions are known as the San Antonio Report. While generally supportive of the work of ICTY forensic teams, the commission recognized the presence of serious problems and accepted that there were grounds for legitimate criticism.

Neither Dr. Moore’s comments nor the San Antonio Report have received the attention that they would deserve if a credible attempt had been made to assess the quality of the forensic work performed by ICTY Prosecution experts. That lapse is hardly surprising considering the one-sided promotion of these forensic data, which few besides us have seen or reviewed, as the Srebrenica “smoking gun”. We have argued long and forcefully that this forensic evidence is neither reliable nor ultimately probative of the prosecution’s case in its most extreme form. We now lay these documents before our readers to enable them to arrive at their own conclusions.

CE Moore letter

San Antonio report