Comments on the international court of justices judgment on the bosnia and herzegovina vs serbia and montenegro case

Abstract EN

On 26 February 2007, the International Court of Justice ICJ rendered its judgment on the merits on the case concerning the Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Bosnia and Herzegovina Vs Serbia and Montenegro).

By this, the Court put an end to the long-awaited judgment which had been pending before it for 14 years.

This judgment will be added to the case law of the Court and will undoubtedly be one of the ICJ's significant case laws with implications despite the political and legal criticism surrounding it.

In brief, the Court concluded that genocide was committed in Bosnia by the Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica in 1995.

However, the Court concluded that Serbia was not responsible for the commission of that genocide or complicit in it, but that it was responsible for failing to prevent it and for failing to punish its perpetrators.

This article examines the judgment of the ICJ in the Genocide case.

It first examines the jurisdiction of the Court to decide on this case, then the Court's very narrow interpretation of the definition of genocide, and finally, the Court's narrow analysis of state responsibility for complicity in genocide and state responsibility for failing to prevent genocide.