UNMIK/PR/825
Monday, 23 September 2002

Selection for Medical Examiners' Office for Kosovo to Begin This Week

PRISTINA - Four international forensic medical experts have convened in Pristina to act as a board of examiners to oversee the hiring of medical examiners for the new Medical Examiners' Office.

The Office on Missing Persons and Forensics (OMPF) is responsible for establishing a permanent Medical Examiners' Office (MEO) for Kosovo, for which a new facility is being built in Kosovo Polje. The MEO will act as the central medico-legal authority for the province, and will employ both ethnic Albanian and Serb forensic doctors. Eight medical examiners are to be hired.

The four members of the examiners' board have been chosen to represent a broad range of forensic medical practice on three continents. The chairman of the board will be Dr. Steve R. Naidoo, M.B.Ch.B., D. For. Med., M. Med., a specialist forensic pathologist and deputy head of the Department of Forensic Medicine at the University of Natal in Durban, South Africa. The board will also include Dr. Carlo Campobasso, Ph.D., M.D., an Italian specialist in clinical forensic medicine, and a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Bari; and Canada's Dr. Bernhard J. Olberg, M.D., F.R.C.P.C., Assistant Professor in the University of Ottawa's Department of Pathology and Laboratory medicine. The fourth board member, Dr. Marek Gasior, M.D., D.Sc, is the resident pathologist at the OMPF mortuary in Orahovac and a forensic medical expert at the regional court in Lublin, Poland.

The board of examiners will set a standard sufficiency exam to be applied to all candidates for the medical examiner post. The exam will ensure a standard level of forensic practice, and will include both pathology and clinical forensic practice. The first exam is to take place on Thursday 26th September.