The Court of Human Rights in the Hague has rejected the mutual accusations of genocide between Serbia and Croatia.
In the end, neither Croatia nor Serbia will end up being accountable for the crime of ‘genocide’ regarding the atrocities committed during the Balkan War of the 1990s. This was the judgment issued on 3 February by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the main judicial organ of the United Nations.
As such, it was the final word on a trial that first began in 1999 when Croatia first accused Serbia of committing genocide, only to be later charged with the same crime by Belgrade in 2010. The ICJ, which is presided over by Slovak diplomat and judge Peter Tomka, rejected Croatia’s claim and Serbia’s counter-claim in a binding decision that is “without appeal”.
No one denies that the crimes were committed. In its lawsuit, Croatia concentrated primarily on the atrocities committed by the Serbs in the region of Western Slavonia and in the city of Vukovar. The latter, which lies on the Danube River, on the border between the two countries, was placed under siege by the Yugoslav army in 1991. Entire neighbourhoods were wiped out by Serbian artillery. More than a thousand civilians lost their lives, and after Croatia’s surrender, close to 200 Croatian prisoners were removed from the local hospital and killed in the nearby Ovčara camp.
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The Court of Human Rights in the Hague has rejected the mutual accusations of genocide between Serbia and Croatia.
In the end, neither Croatia nor Serbia will end up being accountable for the crime of ‘genocide’ regarding the atrocities committed during the Balkan War of the 1990s. This was the judgment issued on 3 February by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the main judicial organ of the United Nations.
