A Decade of Success Stories at BIRN Bosnia and Herzegovina
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International and local investigators, judges, prosecutors and other relevant actors described their experiences and current issues with transitional justice to BIRN, and also discussed possible solutions to Bosnia and Herzegovina’s ongoing obstacles in providing justice and support to those touched by war.
BIRN BiH has published 20 analyses of completed war crime trials, as well as 28 analyses uncovering problems in the work of judicial institutions and the prosecution of war crimes.
Last year, BIRN BiH published a total of 4,034 news articles, reports and analyses, which were broadly shared by national and regional media. Stories and investigations produced by BIRN BiH have been republished a total of 6,600 times.
“Following the prosecution of war crimes, both before the courts in Bosnia and Herzegovina and at the Hague Tribunal, is invaluable to Bosnia and Herzegovina and its citizens. To my knowledge, BIRN is precisely that media organization, which continuously and systematically follows the work of the judiciary and informs the public about its standing and the results that have been achieved by one part of the judiciary’s work,” said Arben Murtezic, the Chief Disciplinary Prosecutor in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Murtezic added that BIRN’s work in improving the transparency of judiciary institutions and their work has been recognized by both the Bosnian public and the judicial community.
Ten Years of War Crimes at Bosnian State Court
In June 2015, we launched a special interactive feature on our website, justice-report.com, titled “A Decade of Prosecuting War Crimes in the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina.” This feature allows readers to see and hear a history of the court’s work as well as victim testimonies and guilty pleas.
Our website, justice-report.com, has had 126,394 visits and more than one million hits. The majority of our readers are from Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Balkans, followed by visitors from the United States, Germany, Austria, Sweden and Switzerland.
We’ve recorded the stories of wartime survivors of rape as well as the testimony of detention camp survivors from across Bosnia and Herzegovina.
“Following the activities of BIRN over the past few years, I can only conclude that their reporting on war crime cases processed by courts in Bosnia and Herzegovina has all the characteristics of professional, objective and fair media coverage, by which BIRN largely contributes to the transparency of criminal proceedings with respect to the general public,” said Bozidarka Dodik, a judge at the Supreme Court of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The BIRN BiH team has also produced two documentaries, such as one about the arduous process of proving that genocide took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Rwanda and another which explores the effect of the Dayton agreement on daily life in Bosnia and Herzegovina 20 years after the war.
BIRN BiH has produced twelve editions of TV Justice, a current affairs and news programme focusing on war crimes and transitional justice. The programme is currently transmitted by 23 TV stations in Bosnia and Herzegovina and three satellite channels. We’ve produced stories on the abduction of passengers from a Bar-Belgrade train in Strpci near Visegrad in 1993, the fatal explosion of a cistern in the old part of Vitez in 1993, children who were killed and wounded during the siege of Sarajevo and crimes committed in Vozuca, near Zavidovici.
After our reporting on the Vitez cistern explosion aired, police took statements from survivors with the possibility of raising an indictment.
In 2015 BIRN BiH has produced 160 daily radio reports and 45 weekly reports on the prosecution of war crimes. Our guests have included prominent experts in the field of transitional justice, as well as survivors of wartime torture.
“Radio content of the sort produced by BIRN Justice Report is extremely important today and also for the future, for as long as there is even one unpunished crime. Every week BIRN’s content shows “the realization of justice” from courtrooms in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which exemplifies the hope that things can still be put in order and that evil, no matter when, where or how it was committed, is being detected, named and punished as such,” said Selma Dizdar, editor of the documentary and drama programme at the Federation Radio of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
War crime proceedings at all cantonal, district and Brcko District courts are also covered by BIRN BiH’s radio content.
In June 2015, the tenth anniversary of the regional BIRN network was organized in Sarajevo, where media freedom in the Western Balkans was discussed as a topic of concern.
BIRN Bosnia and Herzegovina continued its cooperation with the following donors this year: the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Sarajevo, the Embassy of Switzerland in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the British Embassy Sarajevo, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) through non-governmental organization Civil Rights Defenders, Forum ZFD in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the PeaceNexus Foundation.
