Category: Trials
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The Shadow of Impunity: Justice for the killing of Baha Mousa and lessons for Afghanistan
Elizabeth Brown Twenty years ago, on 15 September 2003, a 26-year-old Iraqi man named Baha Mousa died following catastrophic mistreatment carried out by British soldiers in a detention facility in Basra. The incident spawned a complex web of accountability efforts, including a Royal Military Police investigation, a Court Martial, a judicial review case which ultimately…
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Putin and the End of ‘Genocide’?
by James Gow When Russian President Vladimir Putin justified his attack on Ukraine as ‘genocide’ prevention, the hollowness was astounding, the term emptied of meaning. It has become stock for one side to cry ‘genocide’ in pretty much every violent conflict of the past three decades. Those cries usually come from those subject to attack…
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Frenki and Johnny were War Criminals… Just About, or The Last Judgement
By James Gow Almost unnoticed, the last international trial for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia was completed on 30 June 2021. The chief of the Serbian security service and his deputy were found guilty on five charges relating to just a single crime, while acquitting them of all other crimes charged. Bosanski Šamac was…
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The Mladić Appeal Verdict
Genocide and the Last Chance for Bosnian Reconciliation By James Gow The Appeals Chamber verdict in the trial of Ratko Mladić is the last chance to secure a guilty verdict of genocide for the events in 1992. Those events were widely labelled ‘genocide’ and actually spawned the creation of the Yugoslavia Tribunal. It has been…
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Assessing the ICTY’s legacy
Last week (22-24 June 2017), Sarajevo hosted the ICTY Legacy Dialogues Conference, organized by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), in order to discuss what it had accomplished before it closes its doors this December. After two decades, 161 accused, a number of complex trials finished, and with zero fugitives remaining, over…