BiH prosecutors, human rights experts, and health professionals met in Sarajevo on Monday to discuss the development of a protocol for the handling and prosecution of wartime sexual violence. The project would build on the experiences of survivors and institutions in BiH to craft a set of best practices that could be applied in other conflict areas around the world.
In the decades since the Balkan wars, international authorities have begun to pay attention to rape and sexual violence as weapons of war, rather than simply side-effects. “For Bosnia and Herzegovina, this protocol is quite late, but it is a great opportunity to stop mistakes in other areas facing wartime sexual violence crimes,” Bosnian human rights ombudswoman Jasminka Dzumhur told BalkanInsight.
