Enforced Disappearances and the Right to Reparation in Western Balkans

Kolaković-Bojović, Milica and Džumhur, Jasminka (2025) Enforced Disappearances and the Right to Reparation in Western Balkans. In: Enforced Disappearances: On Universal Responses to a Worldwide Phenomenon. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 203-241. ISBN 9781009461719

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Abstract

More than 40,000 people went missing in the ex-Yugoslavia armed conflicts where the fate and whereabout of almost 10,000 of them is still unknown. Since then, various initiatives at the national and the regional level have been made to carry out search and identification processes, but the reparative mechanisms available to families of persons who disappeared have remained underdeveloped, and largely differs within the region. This chapter sheds a light on the recent legislative developments and a jurisprudence in the ex-Yugoslav republics that used to be the most affected by conflict; Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia (Kosovo and Metohija), focusing on the differences in the level of the international obligations for the states in the Region arising from both: different ratification status of relevant international law instruments and the different status in terms of the EU accession processes. The special attention was paid to the direct and ex-tempore applicability of those international law instruments, considering the complexity of the constitutional organisation of the states, but also the different time frames which the states apply when define ‘the state of war’.

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