Overly Lenient Sentence for Wartime Sexual Violence

Overly Lenient Sentence for Wartime Sexual Violence

Copy of Saopštenje - 9On 12 December 2024, the War Crimes Department of the Higher Court in Belgrade delivered a judgment finding Lazar Mutlak, a member of the “Podkamen” Company of the Territorial Defence Srpsko Goražde, guilty of committing a war crime against the civilian population – raping a Bosniak woman under the threat of a gun on 25 May 1992, in the village of Lozje (municipality of Goražde, Bosnia and Herzegovina). Mutlak was sentenced to seven years of imprisonment.

The Humanitarian Law Center considers that the sentence is overly lenient and that the court gave excessive weight to mitigating circumstances, especially given the nature of the sexual violence, which, as established, left lasting consequences for the victim. Although the court conducted the proceedings efficiently, with the main hearing starting on 13 April 2023, the verdict does not provide adequate satisfaction for the victim, who had waited for justice for over three decades.


President honours erased on Human Rights Day

President honours erased on Human Rights Day

SloveniaTimesPresident Nataša Pirc Musar urged the government to fully tackle the worst human rights violation in Slovenia’s history as she honoured the erased, the thousands of people descending from other parts of the former Yugoslavia who were removed from Slovenia’s register of permanent residents in 1992.

The erased have been forced to become human rights advocates, having to resort to all domestic and international mechanisms in the fight for the respect of human rights, the president said as she presented them with the award she introduced last year to acknowledge work for human rights.


Kosovo Takes Careful Steps Towards Remembrance of Wartime Rape

Kosovo Takes Careful Steps Towards Remembrance of Wartime Rape
BalkanInsight_logoA culture of silence exists in Kosovo around the issue of wartime rape, but initiatives like the newly-opened War Rape Survivors Museum in Pristina are trying to make sure the crime and those who suffered are remembered.

S.N. perches on the edge of a sofa, her lips trembling as she recalls the events of April 21, 1999, when she was among some 300 women and children rounded up by Serb forces in a school in the Kosovo mountain village of Dragaqine/Dragacin. The words do not come easily.

“For three days, every day, they took us one by one into the next classroom,” she said. “This happened two or three times a day.”


THE SECOND DECADE – Analysis of War Crimes Trials in the Period 2014-2024

THE SECOND DECADE – Analysis of War Crimes Trials in the Period 2014-2024

Drugih_deset_godina_Analiza_sudjenja_za_ratne_zlocine_u_periodu_2014-2024Early July 2024 marked the passage of twenty years since the establishment of institutions specialized in prosecuting war crimes in Serbia. The second decade of war crimes prosecution was marked by the political relativization of responsibility—both political and criminal—for crimes committed during the armed conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. The dissolution of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) following the completion of its mandate, and the state’s shift in focus towards negotiations for European Union (EU) membership, have further pushed the issue of punishing human rights violations from the 1990s to the margins.

The optimism expressed in the Analysis of War Crimes Processing in Serbia from 2004 to 2013, regarding the improvement of institutional performance in this field through the development and consistent implementation of goals set forth in strategic documents, was betrayed. The adopted strategies for dealing with war crimes, both the National and the Prosecutorial ones, exposed the institutions’ lack of preparedness and weakness in taking steps that lead to more effective war crimes prosecution.


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