Vitaly Churkin, addressing the council Monday, also criticized the court's top prosecutor for accusing Russia of harboring key suspects in war crimes in the former Yugoslavia.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, established in The Hague in 1993, is supposed to complete trials and appeals by 2010, and Russia has been pressing for the ad-hoc court to meet the Security Council's deadline.
"The fact that the tribunal does not have some of the accused available for trial cannot be viewed as a justification for indefinitely extending its mandate," Vitaly Churkin said in response to prosecutor Carla Del Ponte's proposal for a longer mandate.
Del Ponte told the Security Council that although 91 suspects had been put into the tribunal's custody, four key suspects were still at large, including Bosnian Serbs Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic.
Vlastimir Djordjevic, a Serbian police general arrested over the weekend in Montenegro on charges of crimes against humanity in a bloody conflict in Kosovo, an Albanian-dominated province in Serbia, was the latest one to be arrested, and Churkin stressed that the general's whereabouts contradicted the prosecutor's repeated claims that Russia had been harboring fugitives.
"Unfortunately, the usually eloquent prosecutor has found no words today to admit that prosecutors of international tribunals are not infallible," the Russian diplomat said.
Del Ponte said in her report that she was still sure that Karadzic and Mladic were hiding in Serbia or "within Serbia's reach." "I should inform you, however, that my office has no information of Mr. Radovan Karadzic's current whereabouts," she added.
Churkin also said the UN Security Council would have to separately deal with the case of Ramush Haradinaj, a former prime minister of Kosovo and guerilla leader charged with crimes against Serbs in the region.
"We are seriously concerned about the developments around Haradinaj's case. Problems over the safety of witnesses in the case, primarily the allegedly accidental deaths of the major witnesses, must not be ignored by either the Yugoslavia tribunal or states and UN bodies involved," Churkin said.
In March, the tribunal started proceedings on Haradinaj, suspected of issuing orders to force thousands of civilian Serbs and gypsies out of Kosovo, and to carry out acts of torture, murder, and rape.
The former Kosovar leader gave himself up in March 2005. He was released three months later and allowed to continue political activities. He denied all charges against him.
