“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” –Voltaire

With a week left in his 12-year stint as the High Representative (HR) of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), the Slovenian-born Austrian diplomat and honorary citizen of BiH, Valentin Inzko, exercised his omnipotent legislative authority granted to him by the Peace Implementation Council at its December 1997 meeting in Bonn, Germany or “Bonn powers”– the powers conferred to the HR to avoid obstruction by local authorities in implementing the Dayton Peace Accords (DPA) – to impose an amendment to the BiH Criminal Code. Effectively, he criminalized the denial or trivialization of genocide, crimes against humanity, or war crimes that have been found by the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), and other courts in BiH. With the War Crimes Section of the Court of BiH readily accepting adjudicated facts from ICTY final judgments as presumptively, though rebuttably, proven (thus reversing the burden of proof on the defense, as was the practice at the ICTY), the imposed amendment seemingly removes the rebuttable presumption, thus making any adopted adjudicated facts definitive and incontestable; ditto for conclusions of law. Continue reading “The BiH High Representative’s Criminal Code Amendment’s Criminalization of Thought to Foster Reconciliation: dare we publicly question the infallibility of the ICTY’s findings of facts and conclusions of law?”