The Potocari Commission has opened an office in Sarajevo for potential plaintiffs
The Netherlands begins paying compensation to the families of victims of the Srebrenica massacre.
The Potocari Compensation Commission opened an office in Sarajevo for potential plaintiffs, and its website is open to reports from family members of people killed after being taken away by a Dutch peacekeeping base in Potocari, near Srebrenica, in July 1995. , reports BIRN.
However, some relatives of the victims refused to file a lawsuit because they were dissatisfied with the legal agreement imposed by a Dutch court, according to which the country should not reimburse all legal expenses incurred by the families concerned.
On July 11, 1995, when the Republika Srpska army occupied Srebrenica, Dutch security forces in the UN-controlled area did not prevent the genocide. More than 7,000 men and boys were killed.
In 2019, the Supreme Court of the Netherlands ruled that the state was responsible to a very limited extent for the deaths of approximately 350 victims. This concerns a group of men taken from the base of the Dutch battalion in the late afternoon of 13 July 1995. According to the Supreme Court, the battalion acted illegally because it knew that male Srebrenica refugees could be attacked or killed, but even if left at the base, they had only a 10% chance of survival.
Accordingly, the closest relatives of these 350 victims can hold the Netherlands responsible for 10% of the damage. Earlier, the Court of Appeal in The Hague ruled that the responsibility of the Dutch state was 30%, so the “Mothers of Srebrenica” referred the case to the European Court of Human Rights. They hope that the court in Strasbourg will return the level of responsibility to 30%, although their lawyer Simone van der Sluis believes that the chances are small.
Widows of survivors or first-generation relatives can also file multiple lawsuits. For example, in the case when a woman loses both her husband and her son. The amount of compensation under this regulation is EUR 15,000 for widows and EUR 10,000 for other surviving relatives.
Former Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic has lost his appeal against a 2017 sentence for genocide and crimes against humanity.
UN court upholds Ratko Mladic’s life sentence for his role in the 1995 killing of some 8,000 Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) men and boys in Srebrenica.
US President Joe Biden welcomes the sentence of the former Bosnian Serb military leader.
“This historic sentence shows that those who commit horrific crimes will be held accountable,” the president said in a statement.
