ICTY material made available to prosecutors’ offices in Bosnia and Herzegovina, with OSCE support

The first of a series of training events for judicial experts on the Electronic Disclosure Suite (EDS) of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) held by the OSCE Mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Office of the Trial Prosecutor of the ICTY started on 11 November 2013.

The EDS, an extensive archive of documents and evidence gathered by the ICTY Office of the Prosecutor over several years, which was previously only available to State-level institutions in BiH, is now available to all entity-level prosecutors’ offices.  The training on using the resource will consist of four seminars and will be held in partnership with the Supervisory Body of the National Strategy for War Crimes Processing in BiH.

“The EDS is an important tool that will significantly contribute to the processing of war crimes cases referred from the State to entity levels, as predicted by the strategy for War Crimes Processing,” said Milorad Novkovic, BiH High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council President.

Since 2009, more than 300 cases have been transferred from the State to the entity level.

Some 35 legal officers and prosecutors from all cantonal, district and Brčko District prosecutors’ offices will take part in the training events. They will take place in Banja Luka and in Sarajevo, and will be conducted by two ICTY experts at the Judicial and Prosecutorial Training Centres.

Serge Brammertz, ICTY Prosecutor, underlined the full commitment of his office in supporting initiatives aimed at strengthening the capacity of judicial experts in prosecuting war crimes in BiH. “A well-coordinated approach between national institutions overseeing training and international players like OSCE, European Union and the United Nations Development Programme is the key to success.”

The EDS training is part of the OSCE Mission to BiH War Crimes Processing Project which aims to address the most urgent needs of the BiH justice sector in processing war crimes cases. The project is funded by the governments of the United Kingdom, Norway, Switzerland, the United States, Italy and Germany. In 2014, additional funding is expected to come from the EU’s Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance (IPA) funds to help process of a backlog of some 1,300 war crimes cases in BiH.