Twenty Issues of Radio Justice Magazine

BIRN Bosnia and Herzegovina started broadcasting its weekly radio magazine on August 14 this year, nearly a year after we started broadcasting our first audio reports.

The support we received from the radio stations that broadcast our reports and from the readers who access Justice Report on our web page, www.bim.ba, has encouraged us to continue our radio production in 2010.

At present the daily and weekly reports are broadcast by about 100 radio stations all over the country and abroad.

Each week our Radio Justice magazine brings an overview of trials conducted before the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, War Crimes Chamber, and topics and analyses pertaining to the entire process. During 2009 Radio Justice interviewed Sonja Biserko, President of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, Natasa Kandic, Director of the Humanitarian Law Fund from Belgrade, Vesna Terselic, Director of Documenta organization from Zagreb, Mirsad Tokaca, President of the Research and Documentation Center from Sarajevo, Svetlana Broz, Director of GARIWO organization from Sarajevo, Hans Christian Schmid, Director of Oluja (“Storm”) a movie on war-crimes trials conducted at The Hague, and many others.

We would like our Radio Justice reports to reach as many people interested in following the trials conducted before the War Crimes Chamber of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina and many other topics related to justice and war-crimes victims in Bosnia and Herzegovina as possible. In our efforts we receive great support from the media stations with which we cooperate.

“The public has to be aware of justice and war-crimes issues. BIRN is the only media that works in a systematic way. For as long as this topic is open, the weekly BIRN Radio Justice magazine will be a valuable media product. The magazine is substantial, well articulated and well designed,” says Emir Habul, Editor-in-Chief of BH Radio 1 news programmes.

Local media are key partners for the Radio Justice Report project. Mirsada Cosic, Konjic Radio News Programme Editor, says the written and audio reports made by Justice Report journalists, dedicated to following war-crimes trials, are of extreme importance for the general public in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Dragana Sivonjic, Editor-in-Chief of Vitez radio station, says that Radio Justice and our agency news enable the station to follow the trials, “which we would otherwise not be able to follow because of a limited number of reporters and the distance between Vitez and Sarajevo”.

Staff at Tuzla Canton Radio, which covers the broad area of Podrinje, say that the reaction to Radio Justice reports from listeners has been positive.

The situation is similar in the Zivinice area, where our reports are carried by a local TV station. “We carry BIRN Justice Report articles in our news. We receive positive reactions from our TV station audience. We do not have a radio station, so we include the reports in our TV news. The topics covered by Justice Report are certainly of interest to our viewers,” says Nihad Kovacevic, Editor-in-Chief of Zivinice Public RTV Station:

We intend to continue broadcasting daily and weekly reports next year, and we will also expand our production to include audio inserts from trials in most of our written reports.

We receive continued support from the Governments of the Kingdom of Norway, Great Britain and Switzerland, as well as the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the OSCE Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Soros Foundation, NED and USAID.