Goldstone was instrumental in preventing the Dayton Agreement of December 1995 including amnesty provisions for those accused of war crimes in the former Yugoslavia . Some commentators had advocated including an amnesty as the price for peace ; Goldstone was resolutely opposed to this , not only because it would enable those responsible for atrocities to escape justice but also because of the dangerous precedent it could set , where powerful actors such as the United States could bargain away the ICTY 's mandate for political convenience . In response , Goldstone pushed through a new indictment of the Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadžić and his army chief Ratko Mladić for the Srebrenica massacre , which was issued two weeks into the peace talks at Dayton . He lobbied President Bill Clinton to resist any such demands and made it clear that an amnesty would not be a legal basis for the ICTY to suspend indictments . In the end , no amnesty was included in the Dayton Agreement . Goldstone 's actions were later credited with making the negotiations a success . The chief US negotiator , Richard Holbrooke , described the tribunal as " a huge valuable tool " which had enabled Karadžić and Mladić to be excluded from the talks , with the Serbian side represented instead by the more conciliatory Milosević . The Dayton Agreement put direct responsibility on all sides to send suspects to The Hague , committing the Serbian , Bosnian and Croatian governments to cooperating with the ICTY in future
Srebrenica massacre
Srebrenica massacre
Richard Goldstone