When thousands of people are the victims of the most heinous crimes – war crimes and crimes against humanity – as they are in Bosnia and Herzegovina, justice must not only be done but, equally importantly, seen to be done,” stated Ambassador Douglas Davidson (right), Head of the OSCE Mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina. (23-AUG-07)

This article is based on the OSCE Mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina press release, which has republicated here by HRH / Mirsad Pandzic.

He made this statement in his opening remarks at the showing of the documentary film Justice Requires Outreach at Dom Armije last night as part of the Sarajevo Film Festival. Justice Requires Outreach (produced by X-Y Films on behalf of the OSCE Mission to BiH) deliberately made this point, he noted, not through elegance of film-making technique but “through clear explication and direct advocacy.”

The truth of what had happened
This was necessary particularly because public interest in trials is low. Consequently public understanding of the value of the work of judges and lawyers is also negligible.  Ambassador Davidson said he had that day found himself almost alone in the spectator’s gallery at the State Court attending two war crimes trials about events in the headlines still today.  (One concerned a group of men accused of killing a number of people near Srebrenica in 1995, the second a smaller number accused of war crimes in 1992 in Keraterm and Omarska.) 

Davidson said he believed that such proceedings, through the competing arguments of prosecutors and lawyers, help to establish the truth of what had happened. Nevertheless, he added, he was forced to ask himself whether this truth could really be said to have emerged from such a trial if the public at large remained uninformed about these proceedings.

Prosecutors
If reconciliation is to take place in society and the country to move beyond the conflict of the nineties, he argued, the public had to understand “what truths have been established or what facts have failed to be proven.”  In this regard, the film made the point that since prosecutors had the most direct contacts with the public and victims, they were best placed to disseminate information about war crimes cases to the public and “to place such information in its proper context.”

Prosecutors, he noted, constructed their cases “from the agony of those who have suffered most from the most serious of criminal acts.”  Davidson also hoped that the satisfaction that such victims obtained from the establishment of justice would be persuasive to the public and would help establish the importance and the value of such prosecutions.

The successful prosecution of war crimes and crimes against humanity could contribute significantly both to ending impunity in BiH and to “cementing the rule of law firmly in place”, Davidson said. These were both needed if this country were to prosper “as a democratic country within the larger European family of democracies.”