Over the past few years, millions of euros have been allocated to the construction of monuments to war victims – but these huge sums of money have not fostered a systemic approach to transitional justice.
Written by: Emina Dizdarević Tahmiščija
Irmela Sabanovic was five years old in the middle of the 1992-5 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina when she last saw her father, Fuad Malic. Early childhood memories of him are the only memories she now has of him.
She especially remembers a birthday present from him, a children’s skirt called a lambada. “It was white with black dots. That is the only memory I have of him,” Irmela says, recalling her
last meeting with her father in 1993, when she left Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia with her mother.
“He came back for that skirt and brought it to me. That was our last meeting and farewell. I literally cried during the whole journey by bus,” Irmela remembers, in tears.
She still preserves the letters her father sent her while she was in exile in Slovenia. Today, she is the same age as he was in July 1995, when he was killed by Bosnian Serb forces in the Kravica agricultural cooperative, near Bratunac.
She finds it very hard that she can no longer enter the cooperative to lay flowers and recite the al-Fatihah. “After all, that is where he passed away,” she says. [The company owning the site no longer allows visitors.]
She first entered the Kravica hangar in 2013. She had found his remains at two locations near Zvornik. These mass graves have not yet been marked with official monuments or inscriptions.
For years, the only signs at the site of the mass killings in Kravica were bullet holes in the wall. The local authorities did not allow, or build, any monument to those killed there.
In 2022, instead of a monument to the victims, they invested in the renovation of the hall, whose bright new facade does not give the impression that hundreds of people were shot dead there in 1995.
Bratunac municipality, which is in Bosnia’s Serb-led Republika Srpska entity, has spent more than 190,000 convertible marks, KM, on these works. According to data collected by Detektor, in the past four years the municipality has not allocated any money for monuments to Bosniak victims of the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica, or for the marking of mass graves.
Since the beginning of 2020, local authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina have allocated over 5.5 million KM [2.3 million euros] for the construction of war monuments, dedicated almost exclusively to the majority community in their municipalities.
The total amount spent on the construction and maintenance of war monuments in Bosnia over the last ten years has exceeded ten million KM [5 million euros].
But how much has this money really contributed to the transitional justice processes, especially to memorialization as one of the pillars of that process?
Monuments erected
‘as a provocation’
For Irmela, the money that Bratunac spent on renovating the hall in which Srebrenica genocide victims were killed is “a sort of arrogance, spite and provocation”. The municipality also allocated nearly KM 80,000 to repair a memorial in Kravica, but, in its response to Detector, it did not specify which monument this was.
In Bratunac itself, a monument with an inscription says it was built for the 3,267 Bosnian Serb fighters and civilians from the Birac region killed in the “Defence-Homeland War”, and for Serbs from the central Podrinje killed in World War Two.
Bratunac is one of 85 municipalities in Bosnia that responded to Detektor’s query, sent to all cities and municipalities, on how much money they have allocated for monuments since 2020.
Previously, Detektor collected data for the period from April 2015 to 2019. According to this data, municipalities and cities in Bosnia issued tenders to construct memorials to the military and civilian victims of the 1992-5 war worth over 4 million KM.
Representatives of war victims say these monuments were almost always erected to the local majority community, and to spite the others. Experts agree they have not contributed to peacebuilding. Over the same period, about one million KM was announced for the rehabilitation and maintenance of monuments.
The new data collected by Detektor suggests that local authorities have not learnt lessons from the past.
Irmela hopes that the Resolution adopted by the United Nation on marking July 11 as an annual day of commemoration of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide might encourage the process of marking mass graves in Bosnia. Part of the Resolution is dedicated exactly to memorialization.
Bosnia has never adopted a state-level law on monuments to victims of the war, so monuments are erected in various places, without clear and harmonized criteria.
Their appearance and content and who they are dedicated to, are left to the discretion of local authorities, so they are often used to send what some might see as messages of hatred rather than reconciliation.
Memorialization in BiH in the post-war period is marked by the absence of a uniform, systemic state effort to mark places of remembrance, legal expert Lejla Gacanica wrote in a document she prepared for Detektor.
In her policy paper, she states that this is partly because there is no clear policy or guidance on what should be marked, where, and in what way.
Erection of monuments in BiH is essentially a political issue, Gacanica writes, adding that they often carry a clear political message about who the victims, perpetrators and defenders were. There is also a refusal to mark certain events and past sufferings.
Memorials to both military and civilian victims from one ethnic group or other have been erected in places of return, in public places, in schools and cultural institutions, as well as at the sites of suffering of members of another ethnic group, or in returnee settlements where members of only one ethnic community live.
This has arguably had a negative effect on the process of reconciliation, as well as on the return and sense of security of returnees.
Gacanica considers this fragmented approach to the construction of monuments and the organisation of commemorations beyond the “big” already established ones a consequence of disunity about the past, in which victims and their needs are being neglected.
It is partially also a consequence of the absence of clear and uniform legislation on the construction of monuments commemorating the war of the 1990s.
Entity and cantonal laws, as well as the law in Brcko District on spatial planning and land use, form the basis for the erection of most memorials in Bosnia.
Consent for the erection of monuments is most often given by the urban planning departments of local governments. However, legislation doesn’t establish set criteria and standards for erecting memorials in terms of transitional justice.
Bosnia’s 2014 Transitional Justice Strategy, which has never been officially adopted, envisaged the possibility of constructing a single memorial to all victims of the 1992-5 war as well as a single uniform type of memorial to all victims in local communities.
The question of memorials is crucial for the strategy. State authorities should stand behind the building of memorials and maintaining them, so they become “places of remembrance”, it said.
Victims’ associations, as well as human rights defenders, blame politicians for not wanting to adopt a law that would define what can be marked and erected, and where.
Associations from all three ethnic communities in Bosnia meanwhile face the same problem; if an ethnic group is the minority in a municipality where they want to erect a memorial, it will not be approved.
According to Gacanica, more than 2,100 monuments dedicated to wartime suffering in the 1990s have been built in Bosnia – over 1,400 in the country’s Bosniak and Croat-dominated Federation entity. Tuzla Canton alone hosts 288.
In Republika Srpska, the other entity, most monuments have been listed in the area of the Bijeljina region, including Zvornik – home to 231 monuments.
Monuments are far less often erected to civilian victims of war and even less often to victims regardless of ethnicity. Only five monuments have been erected to all civilian victims, irrespective of their ethnic affiliation.
Monuments encourage
reconciliation – or division?
One of the few monuments in BiH that has no ethnic and religious symbols was built for victims of the war in Vares in central Bosnia.
On the square in front of the municipality building, in the shape of a column, without religious and ethnic insignia, the inscription reads: “Pay homage in your own way.” It is in danger of being removed, as it did not pass the necessary legal procedure.
Similar monuments exist only in Zepce, Bosanski Petrovac and Brcko. The “Monument to Peace” in Srebrenica, meanwhile, built in 2020, has caused resentment. Symbolically unveiled on the International Day of Peace, it has exacerbated divisions between the town’s Serbian and Bosniak communities, with some considering it a good idea and others seeing it as hypocritical, as it is not based on the recognition of the genocide committed in 1995.
Srebrenica mayor Mladen Grujicic told Detektor that a municipal assembly session voted for “the erection of a monument that will be universal and without direct connection with victims of the last war”.
But the Association of Mothers of Srebrenica and Zepa Enclaves, an NGO, condemned the decision.
“How he [the mayor] can even stand in front of the Bosniak people or say anything at all with that denial of his … his denial of genocide and minimization of victims. What a hypocrisy it is for him to build a monument to peace in Srebrenica,” says member Sahida Abdurahmanovic.
In January 2024, the Sarajevo City Administration announced a public call for the design of a memorial to civilian victims of the 1992-95 war whose erection would be a symbol of remembrance and resistance to the violence and hatred suffered by its citizens during the longest siege in modern history.
The Union of Civilian Victims of War of Sarajevo Canton has called on citizens to submit the names of civilians killed.
In 2018, the Municipality of Kalinovik allocated the largest single amount for the construction of a monument to victims of the war, announcing a tender worth more than KM 220,000. But, according to new data, Kalinovik didn’t allocate any money for this or other monuments between 2020 and 2024 so far.
On November 15, 2021, a memorial to victims thrown into a pit at Kazani was unveiled at Kazani, above Sarajevo, but without the presence of families of the victims. The inscription reads: “We will forever, with sadness and respect, remember our murdered fellow citizens”, listing the names of 17 victims.
The City of Sarajevo allocated KM 7,000 for this monument. But family members of those killed there criticised the decision because the monument did not name the crime’s perpetrators. The exact number of people killed and thrown into the Kazani pit has not been determined either to date.
Milan Mandic, of the Association of Families of Missing Persons from Sarajevo-Romanija Region, an NGO, says the date for marking the Day of Remembrance of Kazani Victims should be agreed with families of the missing and their representatives, instead of deciding on it at a city council session. This memorial has already suffered damage from the use of spray paint.
Since 2012, meanwhile, parents of children killed in Prijedor during the war have been trying for years to obtain a permit to build a monument to the 102 children killed in the town.
Each year, when marking the “Day of White Armbands”, parents and survivors hope to mark the next anniversary in front of a monument. That was still the case this year on May 31.
Fikret Bacic, whose wife and two children were killed in Prijedor, says ten years have passed since they submitted a request for the construction of a monument to the killed children, but the town assembly has never even considered it.
“So far, four mayors and four assembly presidents have changed, and none of them has had enough humanity to make a historic step forward and approve the construction of the first monument to the civilian victims of war in Prijedor,” says Bacic,
A few years ago, the surviving victims also filed an official request with the Missing Persons Institute of BiH and with Prijedor town to mark the graves, because, under the Law on Missing
Persons of BiH, families are entitled to it.
But the law is a dead letter, says Mirsad Duratovic, of Prijedor 92 Association of Detainees, an NGO. He believes no institution can enforce it.
“Besides having an adopted and passed law, and the Institute dealing with these issues, we are asking the international community to protect mass graves. Why don’t institutions in this country do their job?” he asks.
The law allows for families of the missing and associations to request the marking of sites where human remains were discovered. The condition is to have a certificate from institutions that there was a grave at that site. The subsequent procedure involves the local level of the municipality or city.
But the only memorial established by the law, with a clear goal “to create a dignified place for burial of persons who died as a result of the events in Srebrenica”, by a decision of the High Representative in 2000, is the Srebrenica Memorial Center for victims of the genocide.
Monoument in Srebrenica. Photo: Detektor
Reparations fall
by the wayside
Administrative reparations
BiH has developed a system of reparations operating at the level of the two entities and Brcko District: the Law on the Protection of Civilian Victims of War in the Federation entity; the Law on the Protection of Victims of War Torture in Republika Srpska; and the Law on Civilian Victims of War in Brcko District.
According to Gacanica, one of the biggest problems relates to the unequal treatment of survivors and the lack of a uniform framework for the whole of BiH. A fragmented legal framework results in unequal rights and treatment of survivors.
Civilian victims of the war, including victims of wartime sexual violence in both entities, continue to receive lower disability benefits than military victims of the war.
The monthly monetary support granted to victims in Republika Srpska is also four times less than is granted in the Federation, resulting in an unequal treatment of victims.
There is also the question of the deadline for acquiring the status of a civilian victim of war. The Federation entity has abolished the deadline. But in Republika Srpska the deadline expired in 2023. As a result, victims in the two entities enjoy different rights.
The Law on the Protection of Victims of War Torture of Republika Srpska allowed former detainees, victims of sexual violence or other forms of trauma living in the entity, to seek the status
of a war torture victim.
Victims’ associations and international organizations devoted to their rights have been complaining about the deadline for years, but the authorities in the Serb-led entity still allowed it to expire, so victims there may no longer acquire this status. “This kind of discrimination is unacceptable, particularly considering the still very fragile peace in BiH,” Gacanica wrote.
Nada Golubovic, of Udruzene Zene Banja Luka Foundation, previously told Detektor that it received a response from the Ministry of Labour, War Veterans and Disabled Persons’ Protection that the five-year deadline had been long enough, that victims had been informed about it through associations, and that they most people seeking it had achieved the status. Victims’ associations disagree with this.
Golubovic notes that victims who still want to file a claim must have medical reports collected before 2005. “If they don’t have them, they can’t even seek the status,” Golubovic added.
Apart from this, even for those having all the necessary evidence, there are still different interpretations of whether someone was a victim or not.
Adrijana Hanusic Becirovic, senior legal advisor at TRIAL International, says that TRIAL International provided assistance in June 2023 to Prijedor detainee Fikret Alic in an administrative procedure, whose claim had been rejected despite him being one of the best-known former detainees from Prijedor, and whose face appeared on the cover of Time magazine in August 1992.
Documents may represent a special problem for Bosniak victims in Republika Srpska because they are neither recorded in registries there kept by first-instance authorities nor by local veterans’ associations.
There is no indication that Republika Srpska authorities may provide a new deadline for applications. A discussion organised by NGOs on law implementation in February 2024 heard that the deadline was not long enough, considering the particularly complex procedures and conditions under which war torture victims should apply.
In October 2022, the Republika Srpska’s Republic Center for the Investigation of War Crimes said it had received 542 applications for war torture victim status but only 54 individuals in its registry had acquired the status. At that time, the institution agreed that the deadline for the application should be extended.
Victims meanwhile waited for other rights for years. It was not until 2024 that they were allowed spa rehabilitation for the first time, although the law had previously provided for this possibility.
The House of Peoples of the Federation entity adopted the proposed Law on the Protection of Civilian Victims of War only in 2023. This envisages that victims of wartime sexual violence and children born of that act are recognized as a special category of war victims.
Gacanica explains that, compared with the previous regulation, this law introduced several significant changes.
It introduced reparation as legal ground for part of the allowance for persons with disabilities who suffered from wartime actions as civilians; it introduced into the law children born of rape; it abolished the deadline for rape victims to report rape, and well as for victims of leftover war material; it abolished the mandatory expert examination at the Medical Expertise Institute, while the special commission dealing with identification of rape victims shall continue working. It also abolished means testing for families exercising the right to family disability allowance.
At state level, the Law on Missing Persons provides for an administrative reparations programme. According to this law, missing persons are civilians and combatants who disappeared
during the armed conflicts in BiH from April 30, 1991 to February 14, 1996.
The conditions that must be cumulatively met for a person to be considered missing under this law are that the family has no news about the missing member, that the disappearance has been reported and that there is no reliable information about the fate of the missing person.
Unlike the huge sums of money that authorities have spent on memorialization, often in a dubious way, there has never been enough money earmarked for reparations, as another important pillar of transitional justice.
Bosnia has not fulfilled its obligation to provide a functional system that contributes to the recognition of wartime suffering and enables the recovery of society through reparations or
compensation to victims for damage suffered during the conflict.
More than a decade ago, Bosnia’s Ministry of Human Rights and Refugees and the Ministry of Justice, with the help of the international community, launched an extensive national
programme to improve the status of civilian victims of the war.
This consisted of the Draft National Transitional Justice Strategy, the Programme for Victims of Sexual Violence Committed During the War and the Draft Law on the Protection of Torture Victims in BiH.
Designed as an outline for a framework for extrajudicial achievement of justice, including provision of compensation to victims, protection of collective memory and restoration of trust in government institutions, these three documents represented the most concrete attempt by the Bosnian government to acknowledge the suffering of victims and provide them support to move on with their lives.
But political support was never gained for their adoption at state level. In the absence of a formal reparation system that was supposed to be created under this framework, victims must instead rely on a complex social assistance system, or on individual proceedings before criminal and civil courts, to pursue compensation.
In its report for 2023, the European Commission told BiH to address outstanding issues concerning missing persons, wartime victims of torture and sexual violence, and transitional justice.
Besides suffering physical traumas and injuries from numerous crimes committed in the past war, a large number of victims of the war remain in a state of existential crisis.
More than 200,000 civilians survived wartime detention camps and prisons in Bosnia; 30,000 detainees were killed, or are considered missing.
Wartime sexual violence has left survivors and their families with long-lasting psychological, physical, economic and social consequences. Many still suffer from traumas associated with this violence; some have post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, associated with different mental conditions, or suffer from other physical effects and health problems.
Many of those injuries and conditions are not being treated because the victims still face stigma preventing them from seeking rehabilitation, or because medical services are simply not available to them.
For some types of traumas, such as PTSD, no special treatment or support systems have been developed. In view of this, the introduction of a more efficient reparation system would be of key importance. But existing programmes are incomplete, administratively complex and even retraumatizing for survivors.
The best-known form of reparations in BiH are exercised based on entity laws on the rights of the civilian victims of war and disabled war veterans, and through court proceedings seeking compensation for material and non-material damage.
Reparations in court proceedings – criminal and civil
The government has an obligation to provide all surviving war sexual violence victims with a comprehensive compensation and reparations system in order to restore their hope of a better life.
Compensation to victims includes financial assistance and a whole system of access to psychological, economic and health care.
But, according to TRIAL, allowances for survivors vary across BiH and range from KM 137 to 680, which is too little to cover even their basic living needs.
Beside administrative reparations, victims may also seek compensation through criminal proceedings. But a 2017 study by Amnesty International found that the only four decisions made so
far had not been executed because the perpetrators did not have sufficient funds to pay.
On the other hand, civil proceedings usually end with a negative decision, and victims then have to pay judicial costs, sometimes amounting to more than KM 15,000.
Gacanica explains that, in criminal proceedings, reparations are achieved through the submission of a compensation claim. Criminal proceedings provide survivors with identity protection and psychological support, while also bypassing issues such as the statute of limitations and judicial costs, which impede access to justice in civil proceedings.
BiH does not have specific legislation dedicated to the rights of crime victims, nor has the legislature incorporated specific rules for victims of war crimes or victims of violent crimes into the general legislation on criminal proceedings or enforcement proceedings, to ensure that victims of crimes obtain compensation in practice.
By March 2023, a total of 20 compensation claims had been awarded in BiH in over 700 war crimes cases. Among the awarded claims, three were paid in full through an enforcement procedure and two through a voluntary payment by the convicted persons. The other victims were paid only partially, or were not paid at all.
Unlike criminal proceedings, in civil proceedings the measure of identity protection is abolished, which is why survivors whose identity was protected in criminal proceedings often give up. The
third major challenge in achieving reparations through civil proceedings is the statute of limitations for claims for compensation for non-material damage.
Most sexual violence survivors feel abandoned and betrayed by the system due to the practice of invoking the statute of limitations in civil proceedings for compensation for non-material damage sustained to them.
This often results in dismissal of claims and an additional financial burden, leaving victims feeling disappointed and calling such a practice “an additional punishment for having survived”.
TRIAL International provided one survivor of wartime sexual violence with legal aid, which began in criminal proceedings before the Court of BiH. It became the second case in which a compensation claim was awarded in criminal proceedings in BiH, worth KM 30,000, in June 2015.
But, as the offender did not have sufficient assets, the amount awarded could not be collected and the enforcement procedure could not be carried out through to the end.
There is no fund in BiH from which the awarded amount can be automatically recovered in such situations. The only option for the victims, following an unsuccessful enforcement procedure, is to initiate civil proceedings to determine a subsidiary or additional liability of the entity and the state for compensation, TRIAL International explained.
According to Gacanica, the challenge at all levels in exercising reparations in criminal proceedings concerns the enforcement procedure. No systemic solution is in sight.
As stated in the findings of studies on reparations in BiH conducted by TRIAL in cooperation with the Global Survivors Fund and its local partner, Vive Zene Citizens’ Association, wartime sexual violence was systematic and institutionalized. This was confirmed by judgments of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, ICTY.
Although BiH has established a domestic reparations programme that includes survivors of wartime sexual violence through the adoption of a legal framework for administrative reparations, it is still far from providing adequate, prompt and effective reparations according to international standards.
The findings recommend BiH to adopt legislative and other measures to guarantee that survivors of wartime sexual violence have equal access to effective legal remedies throughout the country, regardless of their place of residence.
Also, BiH should ensure that victims receive compensation in criminal proceedings, provide compensation if the perpetrator fails to provide it, and ensure that children born of war rape are included in the framework of reparations as a special category with specific needs.
The country should also amend the laws on civil procedures so that the identity of survivors who have been granted identity protection in criminal proceedings are also protected in civil proceedings.
In criminal proceedings, prosecutors, judges and courts working on prosecution of war crimes should invest more efforts to ensure that victims can exercise the right to compensation within those proceedings.
“The state of BiH should provide a fund or some other mechanism through which compensation will be paid to victims if we fail to recover damages from the perpetrator through the
enforcement procedure,” says Adrijana Hanusic-Becirovic, of TRIAL International.
After visiting Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2021, the United Nations expert on transitional justice, Fabian Salvioli, among other things, urged the government to adopt a legal framework and national programme that would provide quick and effective reparations to all war crimes victims, warning that the transitional justice process had reached deadlock in BiH.
Salvioli said victims were going through complicated procedures to obtain compensation for non-material damage, and that a worrying number of victims had to pay procedural costs related to civil lawsuits that they had lost.
“Victims have become victims once again – victims of conflict and victims of the reparation system, which is unacceptable,” he said. The collection of procedural costs from victims whose claims have been rejected must stop, he added.
According to TRIAL’s study of the effectiveness of compensation claims in criminal proceedings, in 16 completed cases before the Court of BiH, the District Court in Doboj and Cantonal Court in Novi Travnik, perpetrators were obliged to pay compensation to victims of war crimes in amounts ranging from KM 20,000 to KM 60,000.
Transitional Justice Strategy –
not adopted or implemented
The draft National Transitional Justice Strategy was intended to provide a comprehensive platform for establishing truth and justice and to ensure effective institutional access to compensation and other forms of support.
Nearly three decades after the end of the war, this document has not been adopted. The text, drafted by a group of experts a decade ago, defined the mechanisms for establishing the facts and truth about the war. Today, only victims’ associations are still talking about it.
Eli Tauber, one of the expert group members, previously told Detektor that he had an impression that the document was drafted only to show that BiH had an intention to do something.
“I don’t think the goal was to do anything … All of us who were involved in this team thought we were doing the best for our country. However, someone thought we should just show that we were sort of doing something – not that it should happen,” Tauber said.
Reparations was one of the key issues addressed in this document. It deemed the current system of compensation “unsustainable and discriminatory” and proposed a new, coherent state compensation system, as well as a system of data on all beneficiaries that would be coordinated by Bosnia’s Ministry of Human Rights and Refugees, while respecting the competences of the two entities.
Under this strategy, the state would be obliged to provide reparation programmes for past violations of rights. The programmes would involve material and non-material methods, which have an individual and collective effect and contribute to the restoration of dignity to victims, to recognition and acceptance of suffering, to overcoming the effects of rights violations and de-victimisation, and would improve the socioeconomic position of victims, all with the aim of their resocialization.
Court costs demanded
when compensation
claims are rejected
More than half of the former camp detainees whose claims for compensation for non-material damage during the time spent in detention were rejected have received orders to pay the court and defence costs.
Amounts ranged from KM 1,000 to KM 12,500. Some of them inherited those expenses from their family members who had died in the meantime. If they are unable to pay, they risk having their property confiscated.
Rahmija Hodzic spent 250 days in several detention camps in the war, and after having been exchanged, spent as many days undergoing medical treatment in the Clinical Center in Sarajevo.
“I couldn’t walk, I had problems with my spine and hips, I had heart surgery. I have had four bypasses and one stent,” he says.
He sued the Republika Srpska at the Basic Court in Banja Luka in 2007, seeking compensation for non-material damage due to unjustified deprivation of liberty and imprisonment, and torture suffered in detention camps.
After his claim for damages was rejected, due to the statute of limitations, on December 10, 2021, he received an order to settle the costs of the Republika Srpska Public Attorney’s Office. He was told to pay KM 4,375 and another KM 200 in default interest.
“I feel hurt. I still can’t believe what kind of system I’ve been working in for 40 years. What’s the satisfaction at the end of the day? Should I pay Republika Srpska for having beaten, mistreated and detained us in detention camps?” Hodzic asks, adding that his attorney will appeal.
According to the Association of Detainees of BiH, using data from 2022, more than 30,000 former detainees filed actions for compensation for non-material damage due to unjustified arrest, detention and torture suffered in detention camps from 1992 to 1995.
But the non-existence of a national law on torture victims and effective mechanisms for establishing facts and truth about wartime events hampers their efforts to seek reparations.
One country – different
rights for torture victims
BiH has never harmonized laws on the rights of war victims that exist at entity or cantonal level, or the quality of services they provide.
Almost a decade and a half ago, victims with the support of the public demanded a state-level law on victims of torture, but until now it has remained only a draft that is disputed by Republika Srpska, which has its own law.
The absence of a state law on the issue also means there is no official estimate of the number of detention camps that existed during the war, nor of the number of torture victims. The Association of Detainees of BiH considers that there were 657 detention camps and about 200,000 detainees, based on the estimates of three associations of war victims.
A state-wide Law on Torture Victims would provide former detainees and victims of torture with a core set of rights, including health, social and labour rights, that are guaranteed by international conventions relating to material and non-material reparations.
Without a systemic approach, and due to discriminatory practices, uneven access to rights and lack of political will, victims will continue to face difficulties in exercising their rights.
Children born of wartime rape
In July 2022, associations that have fought for years for equal status and recognition of children born of wartime sexual violence welcomed the decision of the Brcko District government to adopt the Law on the Protection of Civilian Victims of War, which they called the first of its kind in BiH.
Ajna Jusic, president of the Forgotten Children of War Association, an NGO, said the adoption of the law was a pioneering step by the Brcko District, and an important step forward in the fight for human rights at the global level.
“Children born of war rape have been from the beginning a very neglected category of people, not having any opportunities or possibilities,” Jusic said.
For both children and mothers who survived wartime sexual violence, recognition of their status has multiple importance, given that they often face problems related to their identity,
stigmatization, marginalization and isolation.
This law does not recognize additional associated rights, such as getting priority in education and scholarships, however. Civilian victims of war, including victims of sexual violence, are also not recognized as having the right to spa treatment and medical rehabilitation, or priority in exercising their right to health care, despite the recommendations of TRIAL International.
Welcoming the law’s adoption, the Forgotten Children of War Association said that this law should also be adopted by the two entity parliaments.
BiH does not meet
international recommendations
In 2016, the United Nations Human Rights Committee determined that Bosnia and Herzegovina had violated the rights of Sakiba Dovadzija by failing to prosecute those responsible
for her husband’s disappearance in the Ilijas area in 1992, and by failing to provide her with reparations.
It stated that BiH is obliged to find and prosecute those responsible for the murder of Salih Dovadzija, as well as to provide his family members with “psychological rehabilitation and adequate reparations”.
Three years later, the UN Committee Against Torture issued a decision demanding BiH publicly apologize and ensure payment of damages to a sexual violence victim as soon as possible, and systematically address the problem of reparations to victims at the state level.
This was the first such decision made against BiH. It was not until 2021, however, that Bosnia’s Ministry of Human Rights and Refugees formed a working group to prepare a plan to implement the UN decision.
At the end of May this year, the issue was put on the agenda of the Council of Ministers. However, the information and plan were postponed for later sessions for the purpose of further consultations.
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