The Western Balkans Director at the German Federal Foreign Office says the region will be high on the agenda during Berlin’s EU Council Presidency – but countries seeking integration must do their part.
Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Constitutional Court is to rule on whether banning minors and people over 65 from leaving their homes because of the coronavirus pandemic breaches their civic rights.
Gavrilo Stevic, the first person charged in Bosnia and Herzegovina with fighting in Ukraine, told BIRN after his acquittal why he went to the country’s war-ravaged east and how a Chetnik ‘duke’ tried to convince him to take up arms.
Bosnia’s chief state prosecutor Gordana Tadic defended the small number of war-crime indictments issued this year, insisting that her office’s work is going to plan.
The pace of war crimes prosecutions is too slow, with several thousand suspects still unindicted, and the conviction rate is too low, the outgoing chief of the OSCE Mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bruce Berton, told BIRN.
Former Bosnian Serb special police brigade commander Goran Saric, who was acquitted of involvement in the Srebrenica genocide, said that the killings of Bosniaks in July 1995 happened, but questioned whether the massacres were planned in advance.
As Theodor Meron nears the end of his term as president of the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals, he told BIRN that the UN war crimes court “fundamentally changed how we think about accountability” for the gravest crimes.
Bosnia’s state-level Constitutional Court faces everyday pressure from political forces that don’t want to accept rulings that go against their ethnic base, its newly-appointed president Zlatko Knezevic told BIRN.