HEIDELBERG – Rarely does one read such hopeful news: in late June, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) acquitted former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić of genocide. That might sound like a bad thing: Karadžić, who once warned Bosnia’s Muslims that war would lead them down the road to hell, surely deserves [...]

Dragoljub Draža Mihailović was a commander of the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland, also known as the Chetnik movement, during World War II. In 1946, he was captured by the communist Yugoslav authorities, convicted of high treason and war crimes, sentenced to death and executed. The tribunal for his rehabilitation, which began in June 2010 on [...]

On Monday, 14 March 2011, seven Guatemalan citizens filed suit against US health officials over nonconsensual medical experiments – including the infection of some 700 Guatemalan prisoners, soldiers, mental patients and orphans with syphilis – carried out in the Central American country by American doctors between 1948 and 1964. The Guatemalan study, which was never [...]

I was saddened by the news that  Swiss banks have been ordered to release over US$6 million to the family of the late Congolese dictator Mobutu. It shows that despite some recent success stories (i.e., the Montesinos and Duvalier cases), Switzerland apparently still lacks sufficient legal instruments to go decisively after money that has been [...]