The United Nations' top court on Thursday rejected Bosnia's appeal of a ruling that cleared Serbia of genocide during the 1990s civil war. The International Court of Justice, based in The Hague, said it could not take action on the request because "no decision has been taken by the competent authorities, on behalf of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a state".
The appeal was lodged on February 23 under a push by Bakir Izetbegovic, the Muslim member of Bosnia's tripartite presidency, despite opposition to the move from the country's ethnic Serbs and Croats. According to the Dayton peace agreement that ended the country's 1992-1995 conflict, key decisions cannot be taken without the consensus of representatives of the three main ethnic groups.
Mladen Ivanic, the Serb member of the presidency, argued that the appeal request should have been decided by the presidency as a whole. He welcomed the court's decision as proof that "no one can make any more decisions on behalf of Bosnia except its institutions". But Izetbegovic, at a separate press conference, described the court's decision as "politically motivated". He had claimed there was no need for the presidency to agree on the appeal because the request was made by a lawyer the presidency appointed in 2002. Many officials in Bosnia had said the move could spark a new political crisis in the deeply divided Balkan country. In the original case lodged by the Muslim-dominated government of Bosnia in 1993, Sarajevo accused Belgrade of orchestrating a genocide through widespread "ethnic cleansing" during the war, which claimed more than 100,000 lives.
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