The Supreme Court of the Kingdom of The Netherlands confirmed on Friday a 2017 ruling which said that the Netherlands is partly responsible for the deaths of 300 victims of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide, Euronews reported.
More than 6,000 family members of those killed in Srebrenica sued the Netherlands in 2007. Seven years later, the Hague District Court ruled that the Dutch battalion stationed in the eastern town knew that the hundreds of men they expelled from the UN base would be killed.
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Both the families of the victims and The Netherlands appealed the ruling, but the appellate court upheld it in 2017.
The battalion should have let the 350 men stay in the base, the Supreme Court said. By not doing so, it deprived the men of the possibility to escape the Bosnian Serb army, it said.
The chance of the victims escaping death by hiding in the base was 10 percent, the court determined. The state is, therefore, responsible for ten percent of the damage which the victims suffered, it said, adding that family members of the victims can ask for compensation from The Netherlands.
The court determined that the Dutch battalion could probably not have prevented the Bosnian Serb soldiers from arresting the Bosniak men.
The Dutch Battalion was in an extremely difficult position, as the Dutch stood lightly armed against a stronger adversary and the heavily armed Serbs, the decision said.
