UN top court rules neither Serbia nor Croatia committed genocide during Balkan wars

By Joanna Gill with ICJ, ICTY

Published on 03/02/2015 - 12:07

The UN’s top court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague has dismissed both genocide cases between Croatia and Serbia during the

The UN’s top court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague has dismissed both genocide cases between Croatia and Serbia during the Balkan wars following the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

Croatia was seeking reparations against Belgrade for backing a rebel Serb minority in carrying out ethnic cleansing – in particular in the eastern town of Vukovar. The court found that “Croatia has not succeeded in proving the allegations that genocide was committed”.

It was there that the first mass atrocity of the war in the former Yugoslavia was carried out. Serb forces are said to have taken more than 200 patients from a local hospital and executed them in a nearby field.

In the days that followed some 2,500 people were reportedly killed after the town had been captured by the Yugoslav army and local paramilitaries. More people were killed in the three days following the fall of the city than in the three-month siege preceding it. The court cited cases at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which proved that there was evidence to show operations had the effect of making people flee, but could not establish intent for genocide under Article II of the Genocide Convention.

In response to Croatia’s lawsuit, Serbia had filed a counter claim over the expulsion of more than 200,000 ethnic Serbs from Croatia in 1995. Specifically under ‘Operation Storm’ in Krajina. The court found that the evidence produced by Serbia was not entirely conclusive, but there is evidence to establish such attacks did take place. The judge explained that acts of ethnic cleansing can be elements of genocidal plan, but only if intention for destruction is there, but not forcible removal. He added that the killing and ill treatment of civilians was not on scale that it would point to genocide. The judge thus announced that “the counterclaim must be dismissed in its entirety.”

Though many crimes had been committed by both countries’ forces during the conflict, neither side had succeeded in proving the intent to commit genocide by “destroying the population in whole or in part”.

The 1948 Genocide ConventionThe convention entered into force in 1951 and defined genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.

Killing members of the group
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

In Article III defines the acts punishable as: