Reuters AlertNet Lite - Court to rule in Bosnia genocide case Feb. 26

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Court to rule in Bosnia genocide case Feb. 26

12 Feb 2007 19:15:23 GMT
Source: Reuters

AMSTERDAM, Feb 12 (Reuters) - The World Court in The Hague will deliver a judgment on Feb. 26 in a landmark case in which Bosnia accuses Serbia and Montenegro of genocide in the 1992-95 war, the court said on Monday in a statement.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ), also known as the World Court, opened the case last year, 13 years after Bosnia sued the rump Yugoslav state from which it seceded in 1992, triggering a war in which at least 100,000 people were killed.

This is the first case in which a state is on trial for genocide. A U.N. convention on the prevention and punishment of genocide was adopted in 1948 after the Holocaust. If Bosnia wins, it could seek billions of dollars in compensation.

Bosnia's Muslims and Croats followed Slovenia and Croatia in breaking away from Yugoslavia in April 1992, against the wishes of Bosnian Serbs, who were left as a one-third minority in what had previously been a Yugoslav republic ruled from Belgrade.

Backed by the Yugoslav army, the Serbs responded by swiftly capturing two thirds of Bosnia, besieging Sarajevo and launching "ethnic cleansing" in which tens of thousands of non-Serbs were killed and hundreds of thousands forced from their homes.

The U.N. war crimes tribunal, not far from the ICJ in The Hague, has already determined that the 1995 Serb massacre of 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica, eastern Bosnia, was genocide.

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Last updated:Mon Feb 12 19:16:53 2007