Digital archive collection – “Crimes in Foča in 1992”

The Humanitarian Law Center (HLC) presents the first digital archive collection “Crimes in Foča in 1992”.

The digital collection contains judgments, videos, exhibits and other materials collected from court databases and the HLC archives. The aim of the collection is to present and document in a comprehensive way the war crimes against the Bosniak population of Foča committed at the beginning of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

When Foča fell under Serb forces’ control at the end of April 1992, members of the forces arrested non-Serb civilians and took them to detention facilities. A special target of the attack were Bosniak women and girls, many of whom were held in sexual slavery in several detention facilities, where they were raped, tortured and otherwise abused and humiliated.

Some of the most drastic examples of systematic sexual violence during the war in BiH occurred in Foča, which was one of the reasons for the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The trial before the ICTY in the Kunarac et al. case represents a turning point in international criminal law because it expanded the scope of “enslavement as a crime against humanity” to include sexual enslavement. Thanks to this and other ICTY cases dealing with sexual violence, it has been acknowledged that rape is not only a side effect of armed conflict, but also a powerful tool of war used to intimidate, persecute and terrorise.

The digital archive collection “Crimes in Foča in 1992” is available at the following link.