Srebrenica: International justice: Coming of age?

On 11 July 1995 Bosnian Serb forces massacred 8000 Bosniak men and boys in what the UN had designated as the “safe area” of Srebrenica. The International Criminal Tribunal on the former Yugoslavia ruled in 2004 that Srebrenica had been an act of genocide.

My first job in the Foreign Office was as desk officer for Bosnia. I visited Sarajevo and the east of the country during the Spring of 1994. I’ve dealt with the Balkans and with international justice issues a number of times over my career.

This week’s anniversary caused me to reflect on developments since that awful day. I reflected that a child born in Bosnia in July 1995 would  be 18 and now be coming of age.

To what extent has international justice come of age in the two decades since Srebrenica?

Here are some purely personal thoughts:

Ten years to the day after Srebrenica I was in our mission to the UN in New York negotiating on behalf of the UK and the European Union (the UK was then EU Presidency) what became the commitment in the UN World Summit declaration on the “Responsibility to Protect”.

This agreement, endorsed by all the member states of the United Nations, was perhaps one of the more important legacies of Srebrenica and the international soul-searching that followed.

The UN agreed in 2005 that respect for national sovereignty could not be allowed to prevent the international community taking responsibility to prevent acts of genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes or crimes against humanity, where the state or states concerned were unable or unwilling to act.

Helping secure that agreement was an important moment for me, just as it had been a few months earlier to help secure agreement in the UN Security Council to refer the crisis in Darfur to the newly created International Criminal Court.

Subsequent events, not least the terrible violence being perpetrated by the regime in Syria against its citizens, might lead people to conclude that R2P and the ICC are concepts and courts which do not translate into meaningful action.

But we should also remember cases where we have been able to act.  As NATO did in the Spring of 1999, in support of UN resolutions, albeit without explicit UN Security Councilauthorisation, to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe in Kosovo.

And as NATO did in the Spring of 2011, including with important support from Swedish forces, to prevent another humanitarian disaster in Libya, this time implement a UN Security Council Resolution.

And as the international courts are doing week in, week out, ensuring justice for terrible crimes.

So, has international justice come of age since Srebrenica?

Speaking personally, one cannot say that the picture is anything other than heavily mixed. New international institutions and agreements have helped change the landscape. But it remains, as a writer said of post-war Europe after the Holocaust, a landscape with ruins.

Then, as now, the most important message is “never forget”.