The biannual report on war crimes trials in Serbia offers an insight into all war crimes trials conducted before the Higher Court and the Appellate Court in Belgrade, as well as before the courts of general jurisdiction. The report gives a brief overview of proceedings for 27 cases, as well as the basic findings of the HLC regarding the cases.
Forum for Transitional Justice #5 is exploring the issues of the role of education in the process of dealing with the past and reconciliation, particularly the history textbooks’ content in post-conflict societies and processes of democratization.
For societies that have experienced periods of massive human rights violations, the issue of reparations for victims is one of the most important elements for the establishment of the rule of law and creating solidarity and a human rights culture.
On 27 and 28 April 1999, the Yugoslav Army (VJ) and Serbian Ministry of Interior (MUP) conducted a joint, large-scale operation named “Operation Reka” in the Kosovo villages lying west of the town of Gjakovë/Đakovica. During the operation, members of Serbian forces killed at least 350 ethnic Albanian civilians, and expelled thousands more to Albania. The mortal remains of 309 victims were found in the secret mass graves in Belgrade suburb in 2001. With the number of victims, the attack against the civilian population in the Reka e Keq/Reka Valley was the gravest crime against civilians committed during the war in Kosovo, and among the gravest of all the crimes committed in the 1990s in the wars in the former Yugoslavia.
The objective of the Model Strategy for the Prosecution of War Crimes Committed during and in relation to the Armed Conflicts in the Former Yugoslavia (Model Strategy) is to stimulate the relevant institutions to adopt an official state strategy for the prosecution of war crimes committed in the armed conflicts during the 1990’s on the territory of the former Yugoslavia, and provide a comprehensive, informative and objective contribution to the production of this Strategy.
The Model law on the rights of civilian victims of human rights violations committed during and in connection with the armed conflicts in the period 1991-2001 was drafted for the purpose of providing assistance, support and protection to persons, who were civilian victims of the wars or in connection with the wars waged on the territory of the former Yugoslavia, and for the purpose of the acknowledgement of their suffering. The foundation of the Model law was the HLC’s practice in the representation of victims in lawsuits for the compensation of damages and for the realization of the rights according to the now applicable Law on the rights of civilian invalids of war. The solutions proposed in this Model law have been adjusted to the needs of the victims and based on the comparative analysis of the existing solutions in the field of reparation of victims of serious violations of human rights, and the analysis of all drawbacks in the existing framework in the Republic of Serbia for the purpose of its harmonization with the international standards in this field.
You can download the Model law on the rights of civilian victims of human rights violations committed during and in connection with armed conflicts in the period 1991-2001 here.
In March, 2012, the Humanitarian Law Centre (HLC) asked the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) to evaluate their database of human losses during armed conflict in the territory of the Former Yugoslav Republic (FYR) between 1998 and 2000. On December 10th 2014 the evaluation team submitted two reports – one made by HRDAG Executive Director Mr Patrick Ball and HRDAG Field Consultant Ms Jule Kruger, and one made by professor Michael Spagat from the Royal Holloway, University of London:
The selected papers written by the second generation students of the Regional School for Transitional Justice have been gathered in the second issue of the Journal of Papers. The students’ papers have been grouped according to the main Transitional Justice topics– from analyses of war crimes trials, victims’ rights to reparation, and the role of the media in the reconciliation process, to analyses of current endeavours aimed at the acknowledgement of the right to truth about the crimes committed in the past.
At the time of the publication of this Dossier (January 2015), the mortal remains of 52 people were exhumed from Rudnica and identified. DNA analysis conducted on the remains has shown that they belong to Kosovo Albanians killed during the Kosovo conflict in 1999. According to a representative of the Commission on Missing Persons of the Government of the Republic of Serbia, search of the Rudnica site will continue if the relevant institutions come up with new data.
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