SERBIA:The world court is to rule today on whether Serbia perpetrated genocide against Bosnia in the war of the mid-1990s, a historic case that sees the UN's supreme court decide on such a dispute for the first time since the UN's genocide convention was adopted almost 60 years ago.
A panel of 16 judges at the International Court of Justice will deliver a keenly awaited verdict. A guilty verdict could mean billions in reparation claims against Belgrade, and Serbia would go down as the first state ever to have practised genocide. Although genocide is the hardest crime to prove, any finding is final. There can be no appeal.
Human Rights Watch described it as a "historic case". "For the first time, a state asked the court to hold another state responsible for genocide under the convention, which gives the court jurisdiction on such disputes." The reading of a summary of the verdict tomorrow by the British head of the panel of judges, Rosalyn Higgins, is likely to take several hours. The judges have taken 10 months to consider the case brought by Bosnia over the 1992-95 war in which at least 100,000 people, overwhelmingly Bosnian Muslims, died.
Bosnia charges that Serbia-Montenegro, the successor state to former Yugoslavia, "killed, murdered, wounded, raped, robbed, tortured, kidnapped, illegally detained and exterminated the citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina".
The tribunal dealing with such cases has already found that genocide took place in Bosnia, in the case of the massacre of almost 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica in July 1995. The issue is whether the state of Serbia can be proved responsible for those atrocities.