Stay strong and remain committed to ensuring the world does not forget Srebrenica

Judge Mark Harmon served as a senior trial attorney at the ICTY for 17 years. Nine of the cases he led resulted in convictions or guilty pleas, including the historic Prosecutor v. Krstić. The Trial Chamber found unanimously that genocide had been committed in Srebrenica in its judgment of 2 August 2001, a decision upheld by the Appeals Chamber on 19 April 2004. This was the first ICTY judgment for the Srebrenica genocide. He prosecuted that trial with Peter McCloskey, Andrew Cayley and Magda Karagiannakis.

"In September 1995, following the public presentation of aerial images of Srebrenica-related grave sites by Madeline Albright at the UN, the Bosnian Serb Army undertook to cover up the traces of their atrocities by removing the bodies of their victims from various massacre sites and concealing them at remote locations in Bosnia and Herzegovina. A major investigative challenge was to locate those reburial sites and recover the mortal remains of the victims. We managed to do so and subsequently were able to identify many of the victims through DNA testing."

"The Srebrenica genocide judgments have helped to develop and refine, in positive ways, the growing body of genocide jurisprudence. The repeated findings that genocide occurred in Srebrenica have been quite important, not only for the victim community in Srebrenica, but in sensitizing humanity to the fact that genocide and other atrocity crimes can occur anywhere in the world at any time, and only the courageous voices and actions of persons can prevent them from re-occurring. The Srebrenica judgments reinforce the need for international courts to hold accountable the authors of atrocity crimes so that other persons may, in the future, be deterred from committing them."

"In an era when “tribunal fatigue” seems to have set in and the will to hold accountable perpetrators of humanity’s greatest crimes seems to be flagging, it is time for governments and people to renew their commitments to achieving international justice and accountability."