Justice denied for Bosnian war rape victims
The Bosnian government has failed to deliver justice for thousands of women raped during the country's 1992-95, war the human rights organisation Amnesty International said in a report Wednesday.
"Amnesty International is concerned that the Bosnia-Hercegovina authorities have investigated and prosecuted only a very limited number of cases of war crimes of sexual violence," the report said.
More than 13 years after the war ended "many perpetrators (of wartime rapes) continue to enjoy impunity and often live in the same communities as their victims," it said.
The London-based organisation said Bosnian authorities had also failed to provide "meaningful measures of support and protection" for the survivors.
"This results in survivors' continuous fears for their safety, which discourages them from appearing in the courtroom and testifying," it warned.
The are no reliable statistics on the number of women who were raped, but the Council of Europe estimated the figure around 20,000.
The report entitled Whose Justice? Bosnia-Hercegovina's Women Still Waiting also highlighted the lack of capacity in the country's court system and an inadequate legal framework.
The state court and those at the level of Bosnia's two semi-independent halves apply different criminal codes and the latter were not in line with international standards, the report said.
Bosnia was split after the war into two entities -- the Serbs' Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat federation -- linked with the weak central government.
The wartime rape victims also suffered discrimination in terms of the state benefits for which they are eligible. The maximum financial allowance available to them is only 70 percent of the amount available to a war veteran, the report added.
Amnesty called on the Bosnian authorities to develop programmes and allocate resources for long term support and protection of witnesses, and to employ investigators and prosecutors in lower level courts with specialist experience of war crimes cases.
The war that pitted Bosnian Croats, Muslims and Serbs against each other claimed at least 100,000 lives, while more than two million people were left homeless.
Bosnian courts try low-profile war crimes cases, while the UN's tribunal in The Hague, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), handles cases involving top officials from the war.
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