Beyond Justice: How the Yugoslav Tribunal Made History [Video]

Bullet holes, bloodstains and brain matter marked the walls of an empty barn, a crime scene processed to document the worst crime in Europe since the Second World War: the deliberate killings of more than 7,000 men and boys from the Bosnian town of Srebrenica. Journalists and human rights researchers had pieced together the horrifying story based on eyewitness accounts from the few who survived; and then investigators from the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal built a genocide case by collecting evidence from killing sites and exhuming mass graves.

At the time war erupted amidst the breakup of socialist Yugoslavia in 1991, human rights investigations in Europe largely focused on the rights of political dissidents and minorities within the former Soviet bloc. But with the conflict raging through Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia, human rights activists helped put war crimes firmly on the international agenda – with help from journalists who often didn’t …