Proceedings at The Hague on Court TV

It is a 21st century courtroom, almost intimate in scale, that looks as if it were made for TV.

Its walls are a neutral gray and the desktops a cool off-white, each with a recessed video monitor. The chairs are bright blue, echoed in an accent panel behind the bench.

In this quiet, human-scale room in The Hague, trial began Tuesday for Dusan Tadic before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. And cable’s Court TV is there to cover it.

Tadic, who faces charges related to several murders and incidents of torture, is the first person to be tried by an international war crimes tribunal since the Nazi trials in Nuremberg, Germany.

The Hague tribunal, established in 1993 by the United Nations Security Council, has given Court TV unique access to the proceedings.

“It took a little bit of explaining on my part as to what Court TV could do, and what we were planning to do, but they warmed up to it pretty quick,” said Jim Lyons, the network’s news editor.

South African lead prosecutor Richard Goldstone put it bluntly: “If the international community isn’t told what we’re doing here, and particularly if people in the countries where there are victims don’t know what we are doing, then there’s no point in doing what we’re doing.”

Court TV has established its own World Wide Web page on the Internet, a portion of which is devoted to the tribunal. Its address is https://www.courttv.com.