Layered Justice after Atrocities - Case Study of Bosnia and Herzegovina

• In Event: Toward a Criminology of Atrocity

Abstract

Perpetrators of international crimes committed during the armed conflict in the Former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s have been prosecuted by courts at all levels of enforcement of the international criminal justice system: international, internationalized and domestic. Dozens of selected individuals have been tried at the international level by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (“ICTY”), while domestic courts in the successor countries of the Former Yugoslavia have dealt with the vast majority of perpetrators. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, for example, the internationalized State Court at the central federal level and cantonal courts and district courts at the entities level have all prosecuted international crimes. Many studies have analysed the prosecutions, trials and sentencing at the ICTY but the activities of domestic courts remain largely neglected in the scholarship. In this presentation, results of an original empirical study of prosecutions and sentencing of perpetrators of international crimes committed during the Bosnian wars will be discussed and “the layered” justice after atrocities pursued by the international, internationalized and domestic courts in case of Bosnia compared and contrasted.

Author

• Barbora Hola, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam