The parliament of Bosnia's Serb half today began discussing a long-delayed law on the transfer of war crimes suspects with a litany of complaints that the UN court was biased against Serbs.
The Hague-based war crimes tribunal has stepped up pressure on the Bosnian Serb authorities to begin actively cooperating with the court since Serbia's government extradited former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic last month.
But Bosnian Serb leaders are more reluctant to hand over suspects than their counterparts in Serbia, who transferred Milosevic under a government decree after their own law on cooperation with the tribunal ran into opposition in parliament.
Desanka Radjevic from the dominant Serb Democratic Party, which was founded by one of the UN's most wanted men, wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, said the law was not just about Karadzic and his military chief Ratko Mladic.
"Any citizen of the Serb republic could be condemned and arrested," Radjevic said, referring to the Serb-dominated entity legalised alongside a Muslim-Croat federation in the agreement that ended Bosnia's devastating 1992-5 war.
Bosnian Serb Justice Minister Biljana Maric said earlier that the draft clearly defined the role of the police, which is to arrest and extradite UN war crimes indictees. Tribunal prosecutors say 20 indictees are hiding in Bosnia's Serb republic.
They have repeatedly insisted that Karadzic and Mladic are handed over as soon as possible and last week asked the republic to arrest Stojan Zupljanin, a former Serb security forces chief in the Krajina region and an aide to Karadzic.
Bosnian Serb officials initially said they would hand him over if they found him but later that he was not in the country.