A Book on Effects of Hague Tribunal Presented

Professor Orentlicher’s book deals with effects and goals of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, ICTY, including the impact of trials held before that Court on victims and survivors.

Professor Orentlicher offers an extraordinary compendium of opinions and stands about the effects of the Hague Tribunal, giving a fresh approach to the thematic at the moment when the Tribunal’s impact is politicized in public.

The book deals with the question on whether the former Yugoslavia Tribunal has had an effect or impact on the Bosnian society.

The author particularly mentions the importance of certain decisions rendered by the Hague Tribunal’s Chamber for victims. In fact, she considers that victims find it of extreme importance to “call the crimes by their correct names”.

Hence, she singled out a decision made by the Appellate Chamber of the Hague Tribunal in the case against Radislav Krstic, former Commander of the Drina Corps with the Republika Srpska Army, VRS, who was sentenced, in 2004, to 35 years in prison for assistance in the commission of genocide in Srebrenica.

“Although many people in Bosnia and Herzegovina are disappointed, and some are extremely disappointed, by the sentences pronounced by the Tribunal, its verdicts of conviction are sometimes a source of significant compensation. One of them is particularly important in that sense: the fact that the Tribunal established, for the first time in the verdict against Krstic, that ‘Bosnian Serbs’ forces committed genocide in Srebrenica’ in July 1995,” the author says in her book.

The book was published by the Open Society Fund in Bosnia and Herzegovina, OSF BiH. The International Center for Transitional Justice helped in the work on this book. The book is based on interviews conducted in the period from 2006 to 2009.