Victims of the Bosnian war protested in front of the state parliament in Sarajevo on Thursday against a draft law to scrap Bosnia's state court and prosecutor's office.

Protest

Bosniak war victims said justice would suffer if the state court was scrapped because they had no faith in securing justice from the courts in the Serb-run entity, Republika Srpska.

Bakira Hasecic, from the association of women war victims, said they had come before parliament to show “we are still waiting for justice. Our primary goal is that all the war criminals are tried 'under the same roof'”, Hasecic told reporters in Sarajevo.

The proposals to abolish the state court and prosecutor came from Drago Kalabic and Darko Babalj, deputies of the two main parties in the Serb entity, the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats, SNSD, and the Serb Democratic Party, SDS.

Support

Backers of the law refer to the absence of a clear constitutional basis for the existence of the State Court and Prosecutor’s Office, as both were founded in 2003 by a decision of the Office of the High Representative, which was subsequently accepted by the state parliament.

Serbian deputies on Thursday called this an imposed decision and said it did not represent the democratic will of the people. They also accused the two institutions of bias when it comes to handling war crimes committed by Bosniaks.

Drago Kalabic, one of the MPs submitting the resolution, said the act of the then High Representative, Wolfgang Petrisch, had not been what all people in the country had wanted. Bosniak parties opposing the proposal to scrap the state court, argued entity courts would be too lenient to war criminals and would not complete cases with adequate verdicts.

Sefik Dzaferovic, from the Party of Democratic Action, SDA, and president of Constitutional Commission, said that if the court and the prosecutor's office were abolished, many cases would not be tried at all. “If something like that is done, chaos would appear and this parliament will not let that happen,” he said.

Angelina Jolie
Earlier this week Hollywood star Angelina Jolie said her film about the Bosnian war should be a "wake-up call" for the world to act in time to prevent atrocities like those now happening in Syria.

The film has already had a special preview screening in Bosnia for war victims' organizations, as a number of them had expressed concern that it would not correctly present their plight. Most eventually hailed the movie as objective and sincere. But in the Serb part of Bosnia many reacted angrily, accusing Jolie of being biased against their ethnic community which they say she has portrayed as villainous.

(Source: Balkan Insight, with additional content from International Justice Desk)