The families of two men who were killed while fleeing their homes during the Bosnian war in 1993 have appealed to prosecutors many times to find the killers - but as the years pass and witnesses become fewer, they are losing hope.
Facebook and Twitter say they are fighting the spread of conspiracy theories linked to QAnon. In the Balkans, the movement is just getting started.
Public broadcaster Radio Television Republika Srpska has republished stories from the anonymously-run InfoSrpska website at least 91 times over the past two years - spreading information that fact-checkers have labelled biased, false or misleading.
The authorities in the Sarajevo Canton allocated around 1,370,000 euros from 2013 to 2020 to help defend mainly Bosniak ex-soldiers and police officers on trial for war crimes and to assist their families, BIRN has learned.
The appointment of Drasko Milinovic as the new director of Bosnia’s Communications Regulatory Agency has drawn criticism because Republika Srpska’s public broadcaster was penalised at least three times for its reports on war crime issues while he was in charge.
After several European countries started trying former Islamic State fighters for war crimes as well as terrorism, increasing their potential sentences, BIRN Bosnia and Herzegovina analysed what needs to be done if the domestic judiciary wants to follow suit.
Public displays of support for war crimes defendants, nationalist political rhetoric and Bosnian Serb officials’ denials of the Srebrenica genocide are causing unease among Bosniaks who have returned to the town after fleeing during the war.
A court in Orasje in Bosnia says people convicted by the town’s court martial during the 1990s war will soon be asked to start serving their sentences - but some insist that they didn’t even know they were being tried.
Even when perpetrators are convicted of war crimes in Kosovo, the country’s courts never award compensation to the victims, while protected witnesses who need to remain anonymous don’t launch civil suits for fear of exposure.
Trials with large numbers of defendants cannot resume because of the problem of safe social distancing at the Bosnian state court, which will further slow the process of dealing with the country’s huge backlog of war crimes cases.
Sva prava zadržana BIRN BiH.
