In December 2016, the Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) Constitutional Court ruled in the “Ljubic” decision that elements of the country’s electoral legislation undermines the rights of the country’s Constituent People’s – the Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats – to elect their own representatives, as enshrined in the Dayton Accords. What makes this decision so important? The court […]
A court in the Hague is due to issue this month a ruling on a case against China brought by the Philippines over maritime territory in the South China Sea.
Sex trafficking. It happens all over the world but is largely invisible to most. What The Whistleblower (a drama, not a documentary) does is expose it as it occurred in Bosnia in 1999, four years after the Dayton Accord was reached. Rachel Weisz plays Kathryn Bolkovac, a police officer from Nebraska who joins the United […]
The U.S. conducted airstrikes against Serbian forces in 1994 and 1999, and against Libyan troops in 2011, to reduce threats of genocide and humanitarian disaster. But the sole superpower sat idle in 1994 while hundreds of thousands were slaughtered across Rwanda and bodies floated down river past horrified neighbors. Just what criteria the U.S. has […]
This film is not only powerful but also excellent in every way. It centers on a Muslim woman, Ajla, and a Serb soldier, Danijel, during the Bosnian war in the early 1990s. Ethnic tensions, long suppressed by Tito, come to a head as Yugoslavia disintegrates. The brutal ethnic cleansing of Muslims by Serbs is shown […]
Earlier this month I served as a member of the US delegation to the election observation mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina (overseeing presidential, parliamentary and cantonal elections held on October 3). The observation was implemented by the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODHIR) of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) […]