Croatia must do more to find and hand over documents to the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, says chief prosecutor Serge Brammertz .

Croatia says some of the documents were stolen or have disappeared and says it has done all it can to find them.

The country has to complete its EU entry talks by the end of this year to become a member in 2011, but analysts say it is racing against time. Cooperation with the UN tribunal is a key political requirement for Croatia's EU bid.

Croatian Prime Minister Ivo Sanader travelled to New York yesterday to address the United Nations Security Council in a bid to defuse criticism about Zagreb's insufficient cooperation with the war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

At issue are missing military documents relating to a 1995 offensive in which Croatia recaptured territory held by rebel Serbs. The prosecutor has requested the documents for a trial of three Croatian generals.
The chief prosecutor told the Security Council Thursday that Croatia had submitted some additional information about its efforts to find the documents.

"Unfortunately, progress in the lengthy investigation has been limited. To date, the large majority of the military documents have not been submitted to the tribunal," he says.

Sanader pledged Croatia's full commitment to cooperating with the tribunal, saying  that on the issue of the documents "Croatia differs with the prosecutor's assessment."

He says Croatia had asked the tribunal, rather than the prosecutor, to formally assess whether the country has fulfilled its obligations in providing the documents or establishing the chain of custody.

British Deputy Ambassador Philip Parham says  Britain, a member of the European Union, was disappointed Croatia still had not handed over the documents.

"We fully support the prosecutor's efforts to pursue this issue," he says. "We call on Croatia to maintain the search for missing documents and for their administrative investigation to be backed up by criminal charges where there is evidence of illegal removal or destruction of documents."