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The UN’s Human Rights Committee made its first-ever decision censuring Bosnia and Herzegovina for failing to help find five people who went missing near Sarajevo in wartime.
The UN’s Human Rights Committee, HRC on Monday adopted a decision censuring Bosnia and Herzegovina over the five wartime prisoners who disappeared in 1992 after being tortured at the Planjina Kuca (Planja’s House) detention centre in Vogosca near the capital.
The international campaign group TRIAL (Swiss Association Against Impunity) filed the case to the HRC in 2009 on behalf of the families of those who went missing.
“With this decision, the HRC orders Bosnia to secure justice and redress for victims, establish the place and facts of disappearance, and bring perpetrators to justice by 2015,” Lejla Mamut, TRIAL’s human rights coordinator for Bosnia and Herzegovina, told a press conference in Sarajevo on Tuesday.
The five people who disappeared – Fikret Prutina, Huso and Nedzad Zlatarac, Safet Kozica and Salih Cekic – were last seen on June 16, 1992 at the Planjina Kuca detention centre.
Their families welcomed the decision but said that the Bosnian authorities should have acted without being pushed to do so.
“It’s sad to wait for Strasbourg to make decisions when we have our own authorities. Mothers who lost their children and we who lost our dearest expect the process of searching to be accelerated,” said Ema Cekic, the wife of Salih Cekic and also the president of the Association of the Families of the Missing from Vogosca.
However she also described the decision as “major justice for us”.
The UN HRC decision also recommended that Bosnian ministries abolish the obligation for family members to declare their missing relatives dead in order to receive social benefits, and to guarantee that investigations into allegations of enforced disappearances are accessible to the families of victims.
“Bosnia and Herzegovina has 180 days to inform the about the actions taken to enforce the decision,” explained Mamut.
However, she added that “the state cannot be sanctioned if it does not implement international decisions”.
According to estimates by the International Commission on Missing Persons, around 40,000 people were declared missing during and after the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. It is estimated that 30,000 went missing in Bosnia, with 9,000 still unaccounted for.
