Legitimacy of International Courts in the Aftermath of War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity: Victims' Evaluations of the ICTY and Local Courts in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a 2007 survey of victims of war crimes and crimes against humanity from Bosnia and Herzegovina. We study the level of diffuse and specific support for the ICTY among its constituency by exploring the respondents' views about the ICTY and the local courts in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia. Our results show that, whereas the ICTY was the preferred decision-maker for war crimes and crimes against humanity of their choice for the majority of the respondents, ethnicity plays a strong role in the perceptions of the ICTY's legitimacy. Compared to Croat and Serb respondents who typically expressed little confidence in the ICTY, the Bosniak/Muslim respondents seemed to show the greatest degree of support for the ICTY, both diffuse and specific. Although the majority of the respondents evaluated the ICTY as fair, the level of support for the ICTY was sharply divided across ethnic lines as well. The respondents' support for the ICTY was related to the evaluations of the ICTY's distributive fairness, procedural fairness, and the perceptions about the judges' (lack of) political independence. The majority of the respondents evaluated only one domestic court - the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina - as fair.