Complementarity: Contest or Collaboration? - FICHL

Complementarity and the Exercise of Universal Jurisdiction for
Core International Crimes
humiliation or other psychological abuses. They were sentenced to 25, 21,
20 and 14 years imprisonment respectively.
The day before, the same Court of BiH rendered a first instance
verdict against Miodrag Nikaĉević, a member of the Armed Forces of the
Republika Srpska, sentencing him to 8 years imprisonment for rape, and
unlawful detention (crimes against humanity) committed in the Foĉa area
at the KPD detention facility.
On 5 May 2009, the Appellate Chamber of the Court of Bosnia and
Herzegovina rendered a second-instance verdict, sentencing Mirko Pekez
to 14 years imprisonment and Milorad Savić to 21 years for their
participation in the shooting of a group of Bosniak civilians in Jajce
Municipality in 1992. The former members of the reserve police forces
had in first instance been sentenced to 21 years imprisonment each, while
Mirko Pekez had been sentenced to 29 years imprisonment. The
indictment had alleged that on 10 September 1992, the three men, “acting
as an organized group of armed people”, and after having made a joint
plan, gathered 29 Bosniak civilians, including women, children and the
elderly, from Ljoljići and Ĉerkazovići villages, in Osoje village and then
took them to Tisovac, where they shot them. On this occasion, 23 people,
including four minors, were killed. On 12 June 2009, Novak Djukić was
found guilty of the shelling of Tuzla in May 1995 and sentenced to 25
years in prison while on 2 July 2009 a former Serb policeman, Damir
Ivanković, was given 14 years in jail for crimes against humanity in a
massacre of more than 200 Muslims and Croats early in the country‟s
1992-95 war.
On 16 October 2009, the first-instance verdict the Court of Bosnia
and Herzegovina pronounced Milorad Trbić guilty of genocide committed
as part of a joint criminal enterprise in Srebrenica and sentences him to 30
years in prison. Trbić, former Assistant Commander for Security with the
Zvornik Brigade of the Republika Srpska Army (VRS), was pronounced
guilty of having participated, through a joint criminal enterprise together
with Ljubiša Beara, Vujadin Popović and Drago Nikolić from 10 July to
30 November 1995, in operations consisting of capturing, detaining and
“executing without trial” followed by burying and hiding the bodies of
killed Bosniaks from Srebrenica.
The court hopes to process 10,000 war crimes cases over the next
15 years, it was announced in January 2009.
FICHL Publication Series No. 7 (2010) – page 16