War crimes prosecution in your own yard: some indicators of the fifteen-year work of the war crimes chamber of the court of Bosnia and Herzegovina
War crimes prosecution in your own yard: some indicators of the fifteen-year work of the war crimes chamber of the court of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Summary/Abstract: In this paper, the authors pointed out the basic characteristics of the processing of war crimes that took place during the 1992-1995 war on the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina and offered a brief overview of the genesis of the establishment, organization, competencies and challenges in the work of the War Crimes Chamber of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Department is a judicial forum that, in accordance with the laws of Bosnia and Herzegovina, has original competencies related to the processing of war crimes, but it can also delegate those competencies to the entity courts, which it often does in practice. However, the central focus of this paper was the research of certain segments of the fifteen-year activity of this Department in the processing of war crimes in the period 2005-2020. The paper presents a descriptive analysis of certain indicators, which, among other things, included the structure and phenomenological characteristics of the observed crimes, the gender structure of their perpetrators, the type of procedure (regular or summary) in which the crimes in question were completed, the ratio of convicts and acquittals for individual crimes, the manner in which the court decides on the property claim of the injured party and the penal policy, i.e. the policy of sanctioning perpetrators of war crimes. It was established that in the observed period of time, hundreds of criminal proceedings against exactly 400 indictees were completed before the War Crimes Chamber of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and approximately the same number of criminal proceedings are still pending. The largest number of prosecuted are males, who in the majority of cases were 276 prosecuted for the criminal offense of crimes against humanity and war crimes against civilians. Approximately 2/3 of the accused were found guilty of the crimes charged in the indictment, while 1/3 were acquitted. It was established that the court councils in an extremely small number of cases in criminal proceedings decided on the property claim of the injured parties, and that they inherited a relatively mild penal policy.

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