Overview

Executive Summary

SC/10858

Security Council
6889th Meeting (PM)

The Security Council decided today to extend the terms of office of 21 judges of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, established in the wake of the Balkans conflicts in the 1990s.

Serious human rights violations are very often an integral part of displacement crises. Certain violations, such as mass killings, arbitrary arrests, torture, and rape, often cause displacement, while others, such as the destruction of homes and property, can be aimed at undercutting the possibility to return home. Forcible displacement is frequently a deliberate strategy used by parties to a conflict and can in itself constitute a war crime or a crime against humanity.

Balkans: Thousands still missing two decades after conflicts

If I could know where my son Albion is, and if I could bury him and put a flower on his grave and I would be in a better place

Nesrete Kumnova, from Kosovo whose son’s body is believed to be among those transported to Serbia, and reburied there, during the 1999 conflict.

Some 14,000 people remain unaccounted for in the countries that make up the former Yugoslavia – nearly half of the total number who disappeared in the decade since war broke out in 1991.

• Mladic: just another “false start”

• ICC second case ends in the shadows of Lubanga’s trial

• In or out - still no sense of justice

• ICTY: Gotovina’s attack on Knin was “legal” (defence)

• The smaller the fish, the bigger the rap

• Charles Taylor says war crimes courts are tools of the West

• “Dialogue is launched in Tunisia”

Geneva and Skopje, 10 May 2012 – The Macedonian armed forces have destroyed a previously unknown stockpile of anti-personnel mines in compliance with the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention, or Ottawa Convention. At destruction events near Skopje yesterday and today, 1,248 PFM-1S anti-personnel mines were destroyed. These mines had been discovered in 2011 when the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia sought to determine which munitions under its possession would need to be destroyed in accordance with its international obligations.

03/22/2012 22:10 GMT

SKOPJE, March 22, 2012 (AFP) - Special teams of divers have cleared some four tonnes of explosives from Lake Ohrid in southwestern Macedonia, a protected UNESCO World Heritage site, the MIA news agency said Thursday.

"There were unexploded mines, bombs and different munitions for the Balkans wars in the 1900s, World War I and World War II... that posed a potential danger to the population," the interior ministry said in a statement quoted by MIA.