Category: Outputs

The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network published its updated and improved War Crimes Verdicts Map, enabling users to search rulings in cases from courts across the former Yugoslavia and from the UN tribunal in The Hague.

The map includes all the final war crimes verdicts that are available from 42 different domestic courts in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, Kosovo and Serbia.

It also includes the verdicts handed down by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and cases in which defendants died during their trials at the UN tribunal.

In the updated version of the map, users can now search by defendants’ names, the units to which they belonged, the countries in which the courts are located, the crime locations and the dates. It is based on over 1,400 court documents.

The number of verdicts included is now 468, with a total of 1,028 defendants. The verdicts were handed down between 1992, when the first cases in Croatia were opened, and 2019.

Courts in Bosnia and Herzegovina delivered the most verdicts – a total of 209 – while Croatia had the biggest number of defendants, 396 in total.

“This map is the result of our dedicated work in following both international and domestic war crime trials since 2004. While reporting from the courtroom, we as journalists often struggled to get all the documents. Through the years, we accumulated a significant archive and we wanted to share this with our colleagues but also the general public to make their work in following war crime trials easier and more factually-based,” said Marija Ristic, BIRN’s regional director.

“This war crimes verdicts map comes amid growing efforts of courts to anonymise court documents, preventing us from reporting fairly and correctly from trials,” Ristic added.

In the future, the map will also include verdicts handed down by the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals and the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague.

In some of the countries however, BIRN is still waiting for courts to provide all their verdicts.

The wars in the former Yugoslavia left some 125,000 people dead, and around 12,000 are still listed as missing.

The War Crimes Verdicts Map is part of BIRN’s Balkan Transitional Justice initiative, funded by the European Commission.

The project aims to improve the general public’s understanding of transitional justice issues in former Yugoslav countries – Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia.

See the map here.

The new report entitled ‘Balkan Chronicle: Gender Equality, Transitional Justice and the International Community’, produced by Impunity Watch, will be launched on Friday at a presentation at the Marriott Hotel in Sarajevo as part of BIRN’s Transitional Justice Programme.

The report examines the topic of gender justice in post-Yugoslav societies, with a special emphasis on the role of the international community.

One of the findings of the report is that the responses of the international community to violations of the principles of gender equality and transitional justice in the Balkans were often too narrow and lacked long-term political support.

“A broader gender perspective to transitional justice policies in the Balkans is missing. Gender equality and transitional justice policy in the region has been mostly limited to pushing for legally addressing conflict-related sexual violence,” the report says.

“Political settlement and economic reform, which only benefit a few, have been prioritised over the issue of gender equality and justice from the very beginning,” said Thomas Unger of Impunity Watch, the author of the report.

The launch event will feature a presentation of the key findings of the report and a panel on the contribution of gender justice to conflict prevention.

The panel will make important links between transitional justice, gender and conflict prevention, with recommendations for policy-makers.

The panelists will be civil society activists from various parts of the former Yugoslavia as well as international policy- and decision-makers.

The launch event is part of BIRN’s Transitional Justice Programme – a regional initiative that aims to improve the general public’s understanding of transitional justice in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia. The programme is supported by the European Commission.

The launch will take place on Friday at 10am local time, and anyone interested in attending should RSVP to [email protected] by Thursday.

The working languages will be English and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. Simultaneous translation will be provided.

The agenda can be seen here in English, and here in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian.