prijava
THE HAGUE, July 19 (FENA) - The Dutch Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the Netherlands is partially responsible for the July 1995 deaths of 300 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica, Euronews reports.
Relatives of the victims first sued the Netherlands in 2007, arguing that the country is accountable for the deaths of 300 Muslim men because its troops expelled them from their UN base on July 13, 1995, knowing they would be killed.
Some 8,000 Muslims — mostly boys and men — were killed by Bosnian Serbs in the July 1995 massacre in Srebrenica, in the east of what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The BBC reports that the Dutch Supreme Court said the state had 10% liability, as this was the probability that its soldiers could have prevented the killings.
The Bosnian Serb forces killed a total of 8,000 Bosniak/Muslim men in the town of Srebrenica in 1995.
The Dutch had been guarding a UN safe zone when it was overrun.
It is rare for a state to be held liable for failures in UN peacekeeping work.
In 2002, a report into the Netherlands' role at Srebrenica caused the entire Dutch government to resign.
A group of victims' relatives, the Mothers of Srebrenica, are behind the long-running legal action. Their case originally sought acknowledgment and compensation from the UN as well, but the organization was ruled to be immune from prosecution.
An appeals court had previously set the liability at 30%, but the Supreme Court's ruling has drastically reduced that figure.
If Dutch forces had given the men the chance to stay in their compound, there was just a 10% chance they would not have fallen into the hands of the Serbs, and so the Dutch state should be liable for only that proportion of the damages suffered by the bereaved, the Dutch court ruled on Friday.
(FENA) S. R.
