Call for Applications: Memory Activism Fellowship – Deadline: 1 October
Since 1992, Humanitarian Law Center has worked on documenting war crimes and human rights violations committed in the former Yugoslavia, focusing on the victims and their stories. The organisation advocates for a comprehensive and multifaceted transitional justice process. The work of the HLC is based on three pillars: documentation, justice and memory, with the Memory Activism Program as central for the organisation’s future. With its Memory Activism Program, the Humanitarian Law Center commemorates victims through various initiatives, including public debates, documentary films and digital memory activism on social media and other digital memory practices. In addition to commemorating victims of war crimes and mass human rights violations during the 1990s wars, the Memory Program challenges and confronts the dominant revisionist narratives about the wars, provides informal education, disseminates the judicially determined facts about the wars engagingly, using different media formats. Furthermore, the program conducts policy-oriented research and analysis and commentary of official memory politics in the region.
In order to establish the facts about the bombing of refugee columns on the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Croatian military-police Operation “Storm”, the Humanitarian Law Center (HLC) is publishing the data and excerpts from the witness statements about those events, which it collected immediately after the refugees’ arrival in Serbia.
The HLC has monitored all war crimes trials conducted in the territory of Serbia in 2021, namely a total of 26 cases conducted before the War Crimes Departments of the Higher Court and/or the Court of Appeal in Belgrade. The Report provides a brief overview of the proceedings and of the HLC’s basic findings in respect of cases which are of public relevance. A large number of the war crimes cases covered by this Report have been going on for a number of years now, so that previous HLC annual trial reports are also relevant for a full grasp of the course of the proceedings and the pertinent HLC findings.
The Report includes an analysis of 26 cases monitored by the HLC before the war crimes departments of the Higher Court and the Court of Appeals in Belgrade. Also, the Report contains an overview of the general findings on war crimes trials during 2021, as well as important socio-political events that are vital for war crimes trials in Serbia.