Italy believes that Serbia is fully co-operating with the Hague Tribunal, Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said in Belgrade on June 8 2009, Serbian news agency Beta said.
 
Frattini said that Italy would put its view on Serbia’s co-operation on the table at a meeting of EU foreign ministers in June.
 
A joint statement issued after the foreign ministers of Italy, Romania and Serbia said that it was necessary for the interim agreement between Serbia and the European Union to come into effect immediately, while the Stabilisation and Association Agreement should be implemented with no further delays by the end of June. The statement said that the EU should guarantee Serbia's candidate status as soon as possible.
 
Frattini said that it was "unacceptable that Serbia remained outside European integration" and told Serbian news agency Tanjug that Serbia had fulfilled all European Commission criteria for visa abolition.
 
"The time has come to knock down the barrier between the people of the Balkans and the EU," Frattini said.
 
On June 8, Serbian president Boris Tadic said that his country, in complete co-operation with the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague, would arrest war crimes trial fugitives Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic and a wartime leader of rebel Serbs in Croatia.
 
The same day, human rights watchdog Amnesty International alleged that Serbia and Kosovo lacked the political will to protect human rights and to find the truth behind missing persons.
 
Amnesty International said in a report that in Kosovo and Serbia, there were those who preferred that the fates of people who were missing and who had been kidnapped to be buried in the past.
 
The report, covering what it described as 10 years of failure to punish those behind disappearances and kidnappings in Kosovo, said that there had been "a decade of failure to punish one of the biggest violations of human rights that as a result of armed conflict and its consequences".
 
In Serbia and Kosovo, there were serious institutional hurdles to establishing what had happened to those who had gone missing, the Amnesty International report said.