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The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has sculpted the story of July 1995 in Srebrenica. In working to hold accountable the perpetrators of the crime of genocide, among other crimes against humanity, the ICTY’s prosecutors gathered an immense amount of evidence, presented cases in the courtroom, and obtained numerous convictions. These legal proceedings have engendered bitter, ongoing disputes among various actors in Bosnia–Herzegovina over their validity. All these dynamics have affected how historians approach this history. In general, they have not posed questions that stray far from the objectives that are firmly tied to the ICTY’s genocide narrative, with its clear categories of perpetrators and victims, and objective of establishing the guilt of the former and the victimization of the latter. Nearly thirty years since July 1995, perhaps the time has come to ask: what can we learn from this approach that is new? Rather than retelling what we already know about these events, we might consider turning our analytical gaze toward what is called here, “uncomfortable evidence.” This is a shorthand for stories about July 1995 that resist our desire to domesticate them into binary categories of black and white, which are more relevant for legal proceedings, and those who seek to use history to affirm or deny their results. Instead, stories based on uncomfortable evidence – three of which are told and analysed here – invite us to enter a grey zone where we embrace the complexity of human behaviour and take up the challenge of accounting for it. In so doing, historians of Srebrenica can more effectively return to a primary challenge of their discipline: to explain this violent past, while resisting the urge to make sense of it with rigid categories based on their contemporary moral and political positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the specific reference in the Statute of the International Court of Justice to general principles of law as a source, they are seen as inherently a subsidiary source. Subsidiarity means that if there are no applicable treaty or customary rule, these principles prevail. The ICTY has often used article-38 sources, namely international treaties, custom, and general principles of law, to identify the applicable law in its cases. This paper uses a descriptive-analytical method to study the jurisprudence of the ICTY, to explain the application of general principles of law in international criminal law. The findings of this paper show that the the ICTY chambers have resorted to general principles of law to fill legal gaps, interpret ambiguous legal rules, and strengthen legal reasoning in their decisions. The Tribunal's frequent referral to general principles of law to fill legal gaps may be due to the fact that international criminal law is a relatively new field and therefore not significantly developed. Thus, general principles of law have played a significant role in filling the gaps in international criminal law [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The war in the former Yugoslavia produced many highly trained and experienced combatants, some of whom engaged not only in a variety of organized criminal activities such as the illicit trade of natural resources, trafficking and corruption, but also war crimes. In the post-war environment various criminal groups took advantage of post-conflict transition conditions which enabled them to be transformed into legitimate legal entities. The failure to investigate and hold to account those involved in criminal activity meant that demobilized soldiers turned to highly profitable, legally constituted private military and security companies (PMSCs). This is coupled with poorly designed security sector reforms that often fail to enhance effective and accountable security that is respectful of human rights. In recent years, similar transformations of many former combatants and criminal groups into legitimate PMSCs around the globe have raised new concerns about their growing activities across different sectors. This article uses the former Yugoslavia as an example from which to highlight some of the increasingly common problems posed by the creation of private military and security providers globally, as a result of the current uncoordinated processes to prevent armed conflicts. The article reflects on the need to avoid smart sanctions and use other foreign policy tools, while calling for an integrated approach to security sector reform and transitional justice that is necessary for sustainable peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In international law, the term crimes against humanity refers to crimes, including murder, torture, enforced disappearance, etc., committed in a large-scale manner against civilians irrespective of their nationality. The crimes against humanity, together with crimes such as genocide, war crimes, and crimes against aggression, form part of core crimes in international criminal law. The idea of crimes against humanity traces its development to the early 1900s, and subsequently, it received serious attention during the Second World War. The Agreement for the Prosecution and Punishment of the Major War Criminals of the European Axis, adopted in 1945, has defined the term crimes against humanity for the first time in its history. Subsequently, several developments occurred, including the Nuremberg Trials, the Tokyo Trial, the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, etc. All these have significantly influenced the moulding of crimes against humanity. Finally, adopting the Statute of the International Criminal Court has given a final shape to the concept of crimes against humanity and the methods to deal with its prosecution, punishment, etc. Being one of the core international criminal law crimes, this paper examines the historical evolution, the concept of crimes against humanity and the various criticisms and challenges in prosecuting crimes against humanity under international criminal law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The area of Sarajevo at the beginning of April 1992 was violently divided. Units of the 4th Corps of the 2nd Military District of the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA), the armed forces that were gathered and supported the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) as well as many local and foreign volunteers and mercenaries occupied strategic positions in and around Sarajevo. Open armed aggression began after Bosnia and Herzegovina was recognized as an international independent state. After that, Sarajevo was blocked and put under siege for almost four years. After the partial withdrawal of the JNA from Bosnia and Herzegovina, the 2nd Military District of the JNA was transformed into a part of the Army of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (VSr RBiH), from August 1992 under the name of the Army of the Republika Srpska (VRS). Through the transformation, the 4th Corps of the JNA became the Sarajevo-Romanian Corps (SRK) VSr RBiH. In the period of the four-year siege of Sarajevo, in order to control Sarajevo, the said forces carried out a “coordinated systematic and long-term campaign of shelling and sniping” in order to “kill, maim, injure and terrorize the civilian population of Sarajevo”. In addition to artillery attacks, which were the most widespread way in which the inhabitants of Sarajevo were killed, another frequent way of killing was sniper attacks. The sniper clearly sees his victim and kills him with intent. Residents of Sarajevo were intentional victims of sniper attacks and were not safe anywhere. Without water, electricity, gas and other necessities of life, the residents fought a daily struggle for bare survival. It was a day and night fight for survival. Cruel individual and mass murders of civilians, including those of the youngest residents, followed by daily wounding, terrorizing, violations of psychological integrity, illegal actions and others, are part of the crimes committed against the inhabitants of Sarajevo in the period 1992-1995. years. Guided primarily by the verdicts and documents of the International Tribunal for War Crimes in The Hague, as well as other relevant archival documents and the statements and expertise of experts, the author shows in her work what the sniping campaign meant. A very important part is the display and description of the types of weapons that were used in such operations, as well as the description of localities and parts of the city from which snipers were most often used. Based on these data, it is very clear to see what the daily life of the inhabitants of the city under siege looked like. The organization of sniper training as well as the places where the training was conducted and in what way are also important parts of the work. The demand and delivery of sniper weapons and ammunition to the Sarajevo-Romania Corps, as well as the identities of the snipers, as well as hired mercenaries and volunteers from other countries, are parts of the work presented by the author. Based on the examples of the victims of sniping, primarily the killing of children, it is clear that the enemy's goal was to kill civilians with intent, directly and in a targeted manner. In this section, the investigated and identified minor victims of sniper attacks as well as the circumstances of the murder are presented in chronological order. As a clear indication that the sniper's intention was to kill them or seriously injure them with permanent consequences, the parts of the body that were hit, which are very often the head, the area around the heart, the stomach, and the lungs, are also shown. In the final part of the paper, the emphasis is on the prosecution and non-prosecution of persons responsible for crimes committed by snipers, before domestic and international courts. Although there is irrefutable evidence of sniper killings of Sarajevo residents, very few or no indictments are filed against those responsible. The direct perpetrators - snipers, who killed the inhabitants of Sarajevo with intent, have not yet been brought to justice and convicted of the crime.

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Focusing on the guilty plea statements in sex crimes cases at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, this article investigates the ways that defendants re-present themselves, their agencies, and their offenses in response to the legal framework within which they talk. While their acts are at the core of international criminal justice (ICJ), defendants are more often spectators than participants when their guilt is negotiated and judged. They have for the most part also been absent in research on ICJ. As defendants' voices are rarely heard during proceedings, their guilty plea statements produce rare access to war criminal's staging of self and individual agency. At international criminal tribunals, defendants have wide audiences beyond the courtroom, and when they do speak, their stories potentially influence not only the court proceedings but also wider cultural and societal narratives about wartime agency and sexual violence. After identifying a guilty plea script, this article draws attention to a consistent and intriguing silencing of sexual crimes in the past and to how the defendants' imageries of present and future selves align with the ICJ effect narratives about the individually disciplining and rehabilitative character of criminal justice and its general deterrent effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most important topics of Croatia accession to the EU was cooperation with International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in Den Haag. ICTY was created by the international community to prosecuted war crimes committed during the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990es. In Croatia, there was an opinion that the court will prosecute only Serbia and there was a shock when the first indictments were sent for war crimes committed by Croatian forces. A personification of this process was general Ante Gotovina, who was accused among others as a member of a joint criminal enterprise but, in the end, he was found not guilty. At the same time, some parts of Croatian society and media started to build a mythical status around Ante Gotovina. This paper will analyze this type of media coverage and how it did shape opinion and consequentially created a modern myth around Gotovina.

Copyright of Právník is the property of Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of State & Law and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The testimonies of insider witnesses are often key to prosecutions of international crimes, despite significant trustworthiness concerns. However, we know little about the practice of judicial assessments of insider testimonies, that is, which factors the judges consider relevant to relying on insider testimony. With this article, we set out to provide a comprehensive, explorative examination of the insider witness assessment factors used by the trial judges at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the International Criminal Court in 1996–2019. By using multiple correspondence analysis, we show that the factors related to insider witness assessment outcomes are generally similar across the tribunals and tend to focus on the contents of the testimonies, with less attention given to credibility or competence concerns. This research constitutes the first systematic quantitative analysis and cross-institutional comparison of insider witness assessment practice at an international level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studies in Politics & Society / Polityka & Społeczeństwo is the property of University of Rzeszow and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Perpetrators' voices have been traditionally ignored in the transitional justice field and beyond. Esad Landžo was only 19 when he committed the crimes of willful killing, torturing, and causing serious injury to the detainees of notorious Čelebići camp in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 2001, Landžo was sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia for the crimes he committed in 1992. After serving two thirds of his sentence in 2006 and settling in Finland, Landžo and the Danish filmmaker, Lars Feldballe Petersen, embarked on the project of making a documentary movie about Landžo's traumatic memories, remorse, and regret. Landžo had a strong urge to extend his apology to each victim individually and in 2015 went to Čelebići to meet his former detainees. This article will build on a scarce conversation in scholarly, and legal discourse, as to why psychological trauma is considered to be an experience that belongs to victims. It will analyze difficult and untold perpetrators' experiences of criminal acts and explore whether in these experiences there is potential for inner and group understanding. This article draws on the author's interviews with Landžo, the main protagonist in the movie The Unforgiven: A War's Criminal Remorse, a film that documents the extraordinary story of Landžo: from his denial to redemption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The armed conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the period from 1992 to 1995, which ended with the conclusion of the so-called The Dayton Peace Agreement was marked by serious violations of fundamental human rights and freedoms and the commission of horrific war crimes. Prosecution of defendants for these crimes takes place at several levels, ie before: a) the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), b) domestic courts and c) courts of certain foreign states. The paper analyzes certain indicators related to the prosecution of these crimes, their scope and structure, as well as the ratio of convictions and acquittals for certain war crimes, the scope of application of conventional and summary forms of ending criminal cases and court policy of sanctioning perpetrators. It was learned that by the end of 2020, hundreds of criminal proceedings against approximately a thousand defendants had been completed. Most of the accused were prosecuted before the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Court of B&H), followed by the ICTY, and a slightly smaller number before the courts of the former SFRY and some Western European countries. The research established that before the ICTY, out of the total number of accused for war crimes committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as many as 90.2% were convicted of some of these crimes, while the rate of convicted in relation to accused before the Court of B&H was 67.2% , and before the courts in the Republic of Serbia 70.2%. It is interesting that before the ICTY as many as 24.3% of the accused were convicted in summary proceedings on the basis of a plea agreement, while before the Court of B&H 13,3% of the accused were convicted using a plea bargaining as a consensual model for ending criminal cases. So far, 22 people have been convicted of the crime of genocide as the most serious crime before the ICTY, the Court of B&H and German courts, and all convictions related to the activities of the Army of Republika Srpska during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Court of B&H, inherited a relatively mild policy of punishing war crimes. Finally, it was found that certain courts, especially Court of B&H, inherited a relatively mild policy of punishing war crimes.

Recognising rape and other sexual and gender-based violence as forms of, rather than being peripheral to, international crimes has been instrumental in bringing to the forefront the impacts of, and motivation for, crimes committed against women, in particular in the context of war. However, the prevailing silence about women who commit crimes has stagnated the recognition of the diverse roles that women play in war, including being directly involved in the commission of (most serious) crimes. This study attempted to challenge some of the dominant positionalities on women in war by conducting a critical discourse analysis of the relevant legal court material relating to the high-profile cases of Biljana Plavšić at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Pauline Nyiramasuhuko at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Our findings indicate that it is necessary to recognise a multiplicity of personal, social, cultural and situational factors that might influence women's exercise of agency and women's propensity to engage in violence, including violence committed against other women. Consequently, law's gender neutrality is little more than gender blindness if it does not take account of the social, cultural and personal embodiment of gender practices, including in crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most important topics of Croatia accession to the EU was cooperation with International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in Den Haag. ICTY was created by the international community to prosecuted war crimes committed during the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990es. In Croatia, there was an opinion that the court will prosecute only Serbia and there was a shock when the first indictments were sent for war crimes committed by Croatian forces. A personification of this process was general Ante Gotovina, who was accused among others as a member of a joint criminal enterprise but, in the end, he was found not guilty. At the same time, some parts of Croatian society and media started to build a mythical status around Ante Gotovina. This paper will analyze this type of media coverage and how it did shape opinion and consequentially created a modern myth around Gotovina. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

(Series Information) European Papers - A Journal on Law and Integration, 2020 5(3), 1191-1223 | Article | (Table of Contents) I. Introduction. - I.1. Theoretical framing of transitional, post-transitional justice and strategic narratives. - II. Transitional narrative of genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina. - II.1. Genocide charges for facts occurring in 1992. - II.2. Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats: two protected groups targeted by the Serb forces in genocidal crimes in 1992. - II.3. Relevance of the ICTY judgments on Serbia's involvement in the international armed conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina. - II.4. Transitional narrative of the Srebrenica genocide. - II.5. Importance of the genocide charges in Slobodan Milošević's trial. - II.6. Serbia, Srebrenica and crimes against humanity. - III. Post-transitional and strategic narrative of genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina. - III.1. From transitional to post-transitional justice narrative, 2000-2020. - III.2. "Border correction" initiative: how much larger will the post-Yugoslav Serbia be? - IV. Conclusions. | (Abstract) This Article explores the transitional, post-transitional and strategic narratives about the wars in the former Yugoslavia, more specifically in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The criminal justice narrative created by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) dominates the transitional narratives about the Yugoslav wars. It is not uncommon that both sides - the victims and the perpetrators - express dissatisfaction with the justice outcome depending on the verdict. Transitional narratives based on the criminal trials are expected to provide clarity on the distinction between "bad" and "good" guys; between perpetrators and victims; between the criminality of the perpetrating side and the response of the victim's side. With the passage of time, all transitional narratives will be challenged by post-transitional narratives, launched by various societal and political actors for different reasons with specific objectives behind them. For example, the ruling post-conflict elites can decide to create a post-transitional narrative in which they will try to re-interpret or counter the existing transitional narratives with the goal to exonerate the policies of the predecessor regime that led to the violence by reintroducing the "politics of the past" into the "politics of the present" in the perusal of the still to be achieved political objectives of the predecessor regime. Using the example of the ICTY genocide judgments, this Article will explore how its transitional narrative of genocide has been undermined by the post-transitional narratives launched by the Serbian post-conflict elites in the perusal of the unfulfilled strategic goals of the predecessor regimes.

West Germany’s record of dealing with National Socialism is often held up as a model to be emulated by states emerging out of war and mass crimes. This article traces the application of the German model to contemporary Serbia, as represented by the two tropes of 'Nuremberg' (justice) and 'Willy Brandt’s Knief all' (apology). It argues that both events were divorced from their own historical circumstances and presented as contemporaneous elements of a model that set unrealistic normative benchmarks when applied to the Serbian national context. Placing Germany’s process of postwar memory construction in a historical and comparative light, rather than viewing it as an ideal-typical model to be emulated, provides a more productive way of analyzing the complexities of national memory processes in post-conflict states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the legal defence of Biljana Plavšić before the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. It analyses the discursive strategies chosen by Plavšić in her plea of guilt. Utilising the theoretical concepts of motherhood, ‘Beautiful Soul’, double and triple transgressions, and Othering, together with legal and criminological debates on chivalry, Plavšić’s representations of herself and her actions during the war are critically analysed. Studying the case of Plavšić, this article aims to enrich the existing feminist debates on the representation of violent women in the media and in justice tribunals.

Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić, the war-time Bosnian Serb leaders, were first indicted by the UN Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 1995. The two hid for many years, with their trials starting only in 2009 and 2012, respectively, after they were apprehended in headline-generating operations. Their continued evasion of trial was constantly critiqued. After all, thousands were killed, tortured, detained, raped, expelled, and robbed during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and these two men were widely seen as responsible. Pleas were made by survivors and frustration expressed on behalf of the victims, as many said, 'justice delayed is justice denied'. However, as this article shows, the many years the two high-ranking individuals spent hiding were well-used to collect evidence which led to their convictions and life sentences. Contrary to conventional wisdom, delay can actually be beneficial in prosecuting leaders for atrocity crimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studies in Politics & Society / Polityka & Społeczeństwo is the property of University of Rzeszow and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article reviews the book by Professor Charles C. Jalloh, The Legal Legacy of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, published in 2020 by Cambridge University Press. In this book, the author examines the "hybrid" international/national criminal tribunal, known as the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL), which was created under a pathbreaking bilateral treaty between the United Nations (UN) and the country of Sierra Leone as a UN member state. Jalloh seeks to evaluate the contributions made by SCSL to the development of international criminal law. In particular, he assesses the scope and significance of SCSL legal contributions from its solutions to problems arising between its opening and the completion of its work in 2013, having to do with personal and temporal jurisdiction; gender crimes as crimes against humanity; recruitment of children as war crimes; head-of-state immunity; amnesty; and tensions between criminal tribunals and truth commissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When those accused of being high-level perpetrators of human rights abuse die before publicly yielding their secrets in legal and archival arenas, victims may simultaneously express relief about the perpetrator’s demise and grief that, along with it, possible crucial information about the past is lost forever. Although the accused do not usually directly admit their actions and the teasing out of what actually happened is dependent upon the complex processes of cross-examination of their testimony and of records and other forms of evidence, victims project such moments of revelation onto the public act of holding accused perpetrators to account. In their deaths, the accused become foreverfrom- now-on unavailable and thus unassailable evidence – in essence; they are transformed into imagined documents that can never be cross-examined. In this construction, the would-be testimony of perpetrators is given epistemological validity over that of victims, offering up the false and unfulfillable promise of establishing a singular truth. Complicating this scenario, however, is the increasingly open-ended hope offered to victims, judicial processes and historians alike by the application of new forensic methods, for example, in the examination of gravesites and human remains, and by satellite footage, that are generating additional categories of evidence. Using the juridical and archival legacies of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the Yugoslav Wars as case studies, this article argues that when perpetrators die before giving legal testimony, survivors and victims’ families construct them as unavailable documents with imaginary agency to settle competing versions of history. Such imagined documents enter into a complex landscape of human rights archives that has heretofore been exclusively focused on tangible evidence. First, this article frames the case of Khmer Rouge leader Ieng Sary, charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes, who died before giving his testimony in a hybrid tribunal. In the face of diverse archival documentary evidence capable of presenting a more complete and complex picture of atrocities, it contemplates why survivors and victims’ family members placed high hopes on his potential testimony, essentially constructing him as a now-dead living document. Second, it explores a parallel case, that of the death of Slobodan Milošević while being tried by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), and argues that the notion of a dead perpetrator as imagined document has less sway when the public has the opportunity to hear the perpetrator defend himself, regardless of the perpetrator’s own admission (or denial) of culpability. Third, it proposes the notion of imaginary documents. It argues that such imaginary documents challenge dominant conceptions of the evidentiary qualities of tangible records and the archival legacies of trauma by insisting on a more dynamic and holistic view of records that takes the affect of survivors and victims’ family members into account.

There is an ever-expanding system of international criminal justice in which the concern for fairness is equally as powerful as it is in domestic criminal justice systems, but considerably more fraught with political baggage. The goal of our paper is to develop a model of individual evaluations of fairness of an international court and subject our current understandings of fairness to a challenging test by focusing on those with a tremendous stake in the outcomes of trials—the witnesses. We develop a model that emphasizes three core elements of individual judgments regarding fairness: (1) the identity of the individual—those relatively fixed characteristics that individuals use to explain who they are; (2) the individual encounter with international justice; and (3) general, or more objective indicators of Tribunal effectiveness. We then derive specific hypothesis from these expectations. We utilize data from a unique survey of 300 individuals who testified at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). We find that identity, personal efficacy and to a lesser extent, the perceived appropriateness of punishment for the guilty affect perceptions of fairness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aiding and abetting has been recognised as a form of individual criminal responsibility since the 1940’s when the first international tribunals were created. The form of responsibility had a relatively simplistic history of application until it faced an unprecedented upheaval through the introduction of the threshold of specific direction in the Perišić appeals judgment. The judgment has since been rejected by the Special Court of Sierra Leone (SCSL) in the Charles Taylor judgment and by the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in Sainović, Popović and Stanišić and Simatović judgment. The present paper focuses on the relevance of the standard of specific direction before the International Criminal Court (ICC). It argues that the standard is unjustifiable under international criminal law as, firstly, no convictions or acquittals have been affected on the standard and, secondly and more importantly, the text of the Rome Statute has rejected the standard. The standard of specific direction has not legal pedigree under customary law, is contrary to the text of the Rome Statute and counter-intuitive to the objectives of the ICC as it unreasonably increases evidentiary requirements at the Court and consequently makes the fight against impunity, an already challenging task, even more difficult.

International criminal justice mechanisms are guided by their mandates to hold individuals accountable for grave breaches of international humanitarian law. Within this body of law, a host of crimes are listed as prohibited, and if committed, could land individuals before national or international courts. While the legal categorisation of violence into discrete crimes serves the procedural justice of the courtroom, it simultaneously erases the overlapping, entangled, and messy practice of violence. In this paper, I engage in a queer (re)imagining of the legal category of the crime of torture, as defined and practiced at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). A queer reading of witness testimonies reveals the multiplicities and contingencies that constitute torture, but also exposes the logics of gender and sexuality that make the practice and prosecution of torture legible. I argue that the ICTY jurisprudence both erases and embraces the complicated ways that torture is practiced and embodied. A queer reading of this case offers opportunities to expand definitions and applications of torture in contemporary mechanisms of international criminal justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Relações Internacionais is the property of Institute of International Relations of Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The study of global politics is not an exercise in objectivity and rationality, but one that is embodied, personal, and deeply affective. Feminist scholarship both within and outside of International Relations (IR) have pioneered discussions of embracing our affective experiences as researchers, as well as maintaining ethical commitments to research participants and collaborators. In addition to feminist contributions, the emotional turn in IR has seen the emergence of vibrant scholarship exploring the role of emotions in sites and processes of global politics, as well as the role of emotions in the research process. In this article, I aim to contribute to this growing body of scholarship by speaking to these and other questions that explore the role of emotions in researchers' engagement with their work. In particular, I draw on and interrogate my own emotional entanglements with the digital archives of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The goal of this article is to provide insights into the emotional process of reading and interpreting testimonies of violence, and to illuminate ethical concerns that arise – particularly as an 'outsider' – when reading and representing trauma in my research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction to volume 3, issue 1.

After the fall of Srebrenica in summer of 1995, the Scorpions unit, dispatched to support the Bosnian Serb Army as it took over the enclave, shot six men in Trnovo. The men, three of whom were underage, were some of thousands of Bosnian Muslims that fell into the hands of Bosnian Serb troops, and that were executed in the days and weeks following July 11th. A member of the unit filmed the execution. Fragments of the video were first shown during the Slobodan Milosevic trial, and multiple times in the years after, in the courtrooms in The Hague and Belgrade. The video provides unique insights into the nature of the crime, as well as the behavior of the perpetrators, and this article will discuss them in detail, contributing to what we know about Srebrenica, and how individuals are held accountable for mass atrocity crimes.

The crime of genocide is one of the most severe crimes. Its commission always takes time, requires planning, and results in substantial human sacrifices. It is never a single or accidental act but always conscious and deliberate. The commitment of genocide requires performing one of the acts (actus reus) enumerated in the 1948 Genocide Convention and perpetrated specifically against the members of aprotected group, which represents the material element of the crime. However, the element that makes genocide one of the worst crimes ever known to humankind is the perpetrator’s special intention of destroying aprotected group – the mental element of the crime, i.e., dolus specialis, whose complexity and severity has been confirmed before the international criminal ad hoc tribunals and the ICJ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was formally closed on 21 December 2017. During the quarter century of its existence, ICTY’s rulings had a significant impact on public discourses and narratives about the Bosnian war. Different opinions among the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) about ICTY’s role and its verdicts have emerged over time, especially among the leaders of the dominant ethno-political parties representing the three ethno-constituent groups – Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs. Milorad Dodik, current member of the BiH Presidency, a former President of Republika Srpska (RS) entity, and the leader of one of the most prominent political parties in RS, was particularly vocal and critical about the work of the ICTY. This paper closely examines Dodik’s public views and opinions toward the ICTY. We use content- and operational code analysis to analyze key features of his perceptions toward the ICTY’s work while serving as the President of RS for two consecutive terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY, or the Tribunal) completed its mandate in 2017, marking the end of its 24-year lifespan. While the ICTY has officially ceased operations, the implications of the Tribunal's closure continue to manifest in contemporary settings of transitional justice. Embracing a queer approach to time, the ICTY can be better understood as temporally fluid, open, and contested, rather than confined to its establishment and closure. This is because as a site for the (re)production and (re)presentation of discourses, the ICTY transcends temporal boundaries, continuing to shape and constitute (post-)conflict and transitional contexts. In this paper, I deploy queer approaches to time to interrogate how discourses of gender, sexuality, and violence at the ICTY traverse legal-political temporalities. Using the Tribunal's Srebrenica remembrance as a case study, I demonstrate how gendered and sexualised logics constituted at the ICTY exceed the Tribunal's official temporal mandate. Adopting a queer approach to time, I argue that gendered memories of violence at the ICTY permeate temporalities of international justice and global politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global legal landscape recognizes the seriousness of human trafficking crimes yet many cases remain unheard. Current classifications of this crime along with jurisdictional requites for the International Criminal Courts are preventing adjudication of trafficking in persons when there is a factor of transnationality. I argue that the solution to positioning human trafficking into the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Courts is to analyze its rise to the level of a crime against humanity. Until this point, there has not been a human trafficking case well suited to make this argument to thoroughly demonstrate all the elements required to be classified as a crime against humanity. I argue that not only does the cross examination of human trafficking, under the Trafficking Protocol and the enumerated acts of Article 7(1) of the Rome Statute, meet the elements of a crime against humanity, but that the recent human trafficking situation of the Rohingya people in Myanmar further demonstrates its potential application and necessity. Classifying human trafficking as a crime against humanity would put these cases in the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Courts which would give previously domestically neglected cases an opportunity to be prosecuted and potentially deter the growing human trafficking epidemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores antipathy to the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) by Serbians, who feel that not just Slobodan Milosevic but the whole country of Serbia is on trial. The author proposes that social identity and self-categorization, as elaborated primarily by Henri Tajfel and John Turner, are intervening mechanisms that help explain this negative social reaction to international criminal law. This pair of social psychological theories are used to argue that it is the belief in a group threat which produces a strong self-categorization as a group member and predicts the function of social identity mechanisms. In the Serbian case, this paper argues that there was far less social identification at the national level, and greater diversity of national political opinion, before the NATO bombing in 1999. However, the NATO bombing constituted an inescapable threat at the national level, creating an atmosphere in which Serbians felt they were all treated alike regardless of their political opinion; this group-level, inescapable threat produced a greater sense of in-group homogeneity and identification. Rather than differentiating themselves primarily against the Milosevic regime, Serbs who were previously dissidents changed their salient out-group and began differentiating themselves primarily against the Western countries participating in the bombing. The significance of notions of rebelliousness and victimhood in the Serbian self-stereotype helped further define an international stance that rejected the kind of post-war solution offered by the ICTY.

This article examines Croatia’s involvement with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The factors that have made the issue of cooperation so volatile in Croatia are addressed, shedding light on domestic politics of state cooperation with the ICTY.The issue of cooperation--and the challenges it poses to stability and democratization in the former Yugoslavia and to the ICTY’s struggle for institutional survival--will continue to be volatile as long as the tribunal exists. The strong domestic resistance to cooperation in the Balkans underscores the challenge confronting both the ad hoc tribunals as well as the permanent International Criminal Court: how to institutionalize a system of international tribunals in which neither the winners nor losers are immune from standing trial for atrocities committed during battle.Although the international criminal tribunals prosecute individuals and not nations, nationalist groups in Croatia have raised the political costs of cooperation with the ICTY through rhetoric that equates the tribunal’s indictments against Croatian individuals with an attack against the dignity and legitimacy of the Homeland War (1991-1995) and against the legitimacy of Croatia as a nation.The politics of cooperation reach beyond the domestic arena and also involve an interaction with ICTY officials, international institutions, and foreign governments. The Croatian government is caught between the competing pressures of nationalists who oppose cooperation and members of the international community who have conditioned Croatia’s entry into Western organizations upon increased cooperation with the ICTY. The result has been an inconsistent, ad hoc policy that has quickly transformed the aftermath of each tribunal indictment of a Croatian general into a political crisis that threatens to undermine stability and the country’s nascent democratization process.This article begins with a discussion of the tribunal’s mandate and its limited power to compel state cooperation. It then places the Croatian government’s dilemma concerning cooperation with the tribunal in the larger context of the experience of newly democratizing countries that confronted the question of transitional justice in the 1980s and the early 1990s. This is followed by an assessment of Croatia’s cooperation with the ICTY under the authoritarian regime of Franjo Tudjman, which ruled the country from 1990 through 1999. It then evaluates cooperation with the ICTY during the first year of the reformist government of Ivica Racan. Next, the domestic politics of cooperation is examined through narratives of the government’s response to several controversial war crimes indictments: the Mirko Norac indictment in early 2001; the Ante Gotovina and Rahim Ademi indictments in mid-2001, and the Janko Bobetko indictment in the fall of 2002. The article concludes with a discussion of the inherent conflict between the tribunal’s mission to prosecute violations of international humanitarian law and the objective of many transitional regimes to delay such prosecutions in order to bolster their political standing vis-a-vis domestic opponents.

The issue of the military order is a very complex one. When giving or executing an order, one should always take into account the necessity to make choices. The decisions taken may in the future imply criminal liability as a consequence of the order that is contrary to legal norms, or executing it. The purpose of the article is to present the problem of giving an order from the perspective of the crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia, with a detailed account of the R. Krstic's case. The author tried to answer the questions: What is the scope of the commander's liability? Is he liable only for the orders he has given? Does this liability extend to the behavior of his subordinates as well? In the presented article an analysis of selected court cases important from the point of view of the problem of giving an order was carried out. For this purpose, the regulations of International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg were analyzed. Subsequently, an analysis of selected court cases being investigated under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. In conclusion are indicated the regulations of International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the regulations of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A substantial body of scholarship has developed addressing the narrative importance poetry plays in understanding war and conflict. This article develops a new thread in that conversation by examining how poetry and the discussion of poets served multiple, competing, and sometimes outright contradictory purposes at the four-and-a-half-year-long war crimes trial for Radovan Karadžić, a Bosnian Serb leader during the third Yugoslav War. The article endeavors to classify each of the principal ways poetry was used as evidence or as argument at Karadžić's trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. A review of 47,659 pages of the public trial transcripts reveals that poetry and discussion of poets served both as a sword and a shield, depending on whether the prosecution or defense invoked poetry and poets, and why. Finally, the article comments on poetry's narrative import for the legal-historic record of Karadžić's trial and the precedent it sets for including creative arts in prosecutions for war crimes – a precedent with utility for deterrence and vigilance in an increasingly fractured international scene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A substantial body of scholarship has developed addressing the narrative importance poetry plays in understanding war and conflict. This article develops a new thread in that conversation by examining how poetry and the discussion of poets served multiple, competing, and sometimes outright contradictory purposes at the four-and-a-half-year-long war crimes trial for Radovan Karadžić, a Bosnian Serb leader during the third Yugoslav War. The article endeavors to classify each of the principal ways poetry was used as evidence or as argument at Karadžić's trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. A review of 47,659 pages of the public trial transcripts reveals that poetry and discussion of poets served both as a sword and a shield, depending on whether the prosecution or defense invoked poetry and poets, and why. Finally, the article comments on poetry's narrative import for the legal-historic record of Karadžić's trial and the precedent it sets for including creative arts in prosecutions for war crimes – a precedent with utility for deterrence and vigilance in an increasingly fractured international scene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]