Transitional justice

The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network has selected 13 journalists, historians, artists and activists to receive grants to create small projects based on the archives of the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague and domestic courts in former Yugoslav countries.

Seven years after his mother, Magda, died, Szabó, an ethnic Hungarian, finds himself locked in a legal battle over the property she left him and his brother, property she won back from the Romanian state in the early 2000s decades after it was stripped from her father in the immediate aftermath of World War Two.

When COVID-19 stopped the world in its tracks, BIRN sought to provide its readers with fast, credible information on the pandemic, as well as shine a light on the state of digital rights in these unprecedented times.

BIRN, in cooperation with the United Nations Development Programme, UNDP, is calling for journalists to apply for a three-day course next month on reporting on transitional justice issues such as war crimes trials.

A new report by the Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Centre, published on Wednesday, said there has been no progress this year so far in the implementation of Serbia's national strategy for the prosecution of war crimes.

Greek lawmakers on April 17voted through a resolution demanding the payment of German war crime reparations, an issue long disputed by Berlin.

The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network published a major report on post-conflict justice in the former Yugoslavia, highlighting regional challenges in dealing with issues like war crimes prosecutions, missing persons and victims’ participation in judicial processes.

A report by Impunity Watch says the “highly troubled” state of transitional justice must be addressed urgently in the Balkans, where war crimes prosecutions are declining and nationalist rhetoric persists.

At its closing event, UN Secretary-General Antonio Gutteres said the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia had shown the international community’s commitment to holding war criminals accountable.

The Humanitarian Law Centre Kosovo said that school textbooks should include a chapter on transitional justice, teaching pupils about war crimes trials and how to deal with the past.