A Case Study in Underachievement: The International Courts and Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina

Abstract

Two international courts—the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ)—have established that genocide occurred in Srebrenica in Bosnia in 1995. Germany's courts have concluded that genocide occurred in both Northern and Eastern Bosnia in 1992, and an appeal against a conviction for genocide on this basis was dismissed by a third international court—the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Yet, there has been minimal international punishment of genocide in Bosnia. Serbia was convicted by the ICJ only of a failure to prevent and punish genocide. Only one middle-ranking individual has been definitely convicted of a genocide-related charge by the ICTY; three others of similar or lower rank have been convicted but are appealing the convictions. Only six individuals from Serbia or Montenegro were ever indicted by the ICTY for war crimes in Bosnia and no one has yet been convicted. Of the two most notorious Bosnian Serb genocide suspects—Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadžić—the first has not yet been arrested while the second was arrested only in July 2008 and has not yet been convicted. International awareness that systematic mass murder occurred in Bosnia and the courts' conclusive verdict that at least some of this involved genocide have translated into minimal punishment of the perpetrators. This paper explores the reasons why international justice has underachieved in regards to the mass murder in Bosnia by examining the structural weaknesses, political pressures, and errors of judgment that have hampered the international courts.