In transitional societies truth commissions are a standard way of fact finding about violations of human rights during the previous period. There are other mechanisms of transitional justice, where fact finding is not the primary task, but which indirectly contribute to this goal. The trials before the Hague Tribunal, for example, enabled the public in post-Yugoslav countries to find out a series of important facts which would otherwise have remained filed in archives. The work of commissions for finding the missing, as well as international organizations involved in these activities (International Committee of the Red Cross, International Commission for Missing Persons) is also of invaluable importance for fact finding, for the families and friends of the identified, and also for the wider public.
In none of the post-Yugoslav countries has a single efficient truth commission been established. Various actors have implemented projects in recent years, which are in a way substitutes for a body which would deal with fact finding on crimes from the past. Compiling detailed lists of victims is typical of these kinds of projects, where the Research and Documentation Center from Sarajevo and the International Committee of the Red Cross (with regard to the missing) have made a great contribution. Projects of so called oral history are to a certain extent a substitute for testimonies before a truth commission, although they only cover part of the activities which are in other transitional countries dealt with by commissions. Unlike the activities of truth commissions, the authority of the state does not stand behind oral history projects.
In the successor states to the former Yugoslavia there is no official body which deals, in a systematic way at state or inter-state level, with fact finding about past crimes. One such commission was founded in 2001 in the then Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro), but the constitution of the commission and the character of political forces standing behind it left an impression within Serbian and regional civil society that the actual goal of the commission was a nationalist distortion of history. Without the support of civil society, the commission was disbanded before it held a single public hearing or undertook any important activity.
The most substantial initiatives towards establishing truth commission at a national level were undertaken for years by the representatives of the non-governmental sector in BiH. At the ”Truth and Reconciliation“ conference, held in Sarajevo in 2000, more than one hundred non-government organizations from BiH agreed that such a commission should be established at state level by a decision of the state parliament. No commission was formed, however, due to lack of political will and the fear among the victims that the work of the commission could result in amnesty for war crimes. In 2006 parliamentary parties took part for the first time in concrete activities which could potentially lead to the establishment of a truth commission, when a working group made up of representatives from the parliamentary parties drafted a law on truth commissions.
There were no similar initiatives or even serious debates in other post-Yugoslav countries on establishing a national truth commission. At civil society consultations, instead, representatives discussed the possible establishing of a regional body for fact finding about the past and enabling victims to give direct testimonies of their experiences.
