The session of the parliament in Bosnia’s Serb-majority Republika Srpska (RS) entity began on Tuesday with a minute of silence for former Bosnian Serb leader and convicted war criminal Momcilo Krajisnik who died recently due to COVID-19.
Krajisnik was in 2006 sentenced to 27 years in prison for crimes against humanity, including extermination, murder, persecution, deportation, and forced transfer.
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The judges of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) found that Krajisnik was part of a joint criminal enterprise which carried out the extermination, murder, persecution and deportation of non-Serbs during the 1992 – 1995 Bosnian war.
He was acquitted of genocide or complicity in genocide on the grounds that the court had found no evidence of a genocidal intent on his part to destroy in full or part ethnic or religious communities.
The charges of murder and extermination were dropped in 2009 and the sentence was reduced to 20 years.
The ICTY judges found that while there was evidence that crimes committed in Bosnia constituted the criminal act of genocide, they did not establish that the accused possessed genocidal intent or was part of a criminal enterprise that had such an intent.
MPs in the semi-autonomous RS region had numerous topics on the agenda to discuss on Tuesday, including reports by various institutions and draft laws on real estate mediation, administrative inspection, agreed out-of-court financial restructuring and protection of the right to a trial within a reasonable time.
Also on the agenda is the Special Report by the Human Rights Ombudsman of Bosnia and Herzegovina on the representation of constituent peoples and others in institutions, administrative organizations and regulatory bodies of the state, the Federation (FBiH) entity, Republika Srpska, the Brcko District and cantons in FBiH.
