Bosnia and Herzegovina

The overall objective of the Justice Sector Reform Strategy is to create a joint framework of reform for justice sector institutions in BiH that sets out agreed priorities for the future development of the sector as a whole, as well as realistic actions for reform.
This strategy was created through a joint effort between the ministries of justice of the State of BiH, the entities, and cantons, as well as Brčko District Judicial Commission and the High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council. It is the result of a highly participatory and consultative process that encompassed key justice sector institutions of Bosnia Herzegovina, including representatives of professional associations of judges and prosecutors, bar associations, association of mediators and NGOs. Its aim is to provide a strategic framework for addressing key issues within the justice sector over a five year timeframe.

This strategy was created through a joint effort between the ministries of justice of the State of BiH, the entities, and cantons, as well as Brčko District Judicial Commission and the High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council. It is the result of a highly participatory and consultative process that encompassed key justice sector institutions of Bosnia Herzegovina, including representatives of professional associations of judges and prosecutors, bar associations, association of mediators and NGOs. Its aim is to provide a strategic framework for addressing key issues within the justice sector over a five year timeframe. The overall objective of the Justice Sector Reform Strategy is to create a joint framework of reform for justice sector institutions in BiH that sets out agreed priorities for the future development of the sector as a whole, as well as realistic actions for reform.

Following the establishment of the international ad hoc tribunals, the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda (ICTY and ICTR respectively), a new model of justice administration emerged at the end of the 1990s through the development of hybrid or internationalised courts. Hybrid tribunals are conceived as a mixture of international and domestic law and staff, as a way to provide the necessary resources and guarantees for justice closer to those whose work matters to most. This paper looks at the two most recent tribunals, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) and the War Crimes Chamber in the State Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina (WCC) and examines their practice related to the expectations that hybrid tribunals have raised in terms of peacebuilding. Based on the authors’ fieldwork in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Cambodia, this paper focuses particularly on the tribunals’ impact on the rebuilding of the rule of law, the strengthening of public institutions in the countries in which they operate and the perception of the public of their work. It considers the experience of the tribunals so far, problems and ongoing challenges in order to draw some lessons which can impact both their future work and other potential tribunals in post-­‐conflict settings.

Intervening states apply different approaches to the use force in war-torn countries. Calibrating the use of force according to the situation on the ground requires a convergence of military and police roles: soldiers have to be able to scale down, and police officers to scale up their use of force. In practice, intervening states display widely differing abilities to demonstrate such versatility. This paper argues that these differences are shaped by how the domestic institutions of sending states mediate between demands for versatile force and their own intervention practices. It considers the use of force by Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States in three contexts of international intervention: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Afghanistan. The paper highlights quite different responses to security problems as varied as insurgency, terrorism, organised crime and riots. This analysis offers important lessons. Those planning and implementing international interventions should take into account differences in the use of force. At the same time, moving towards versatile force profoundly changes the characteristics of security forces and may increase their short-term risks. This difficulty points to a key message emerging from this paper: effective, sustainable support to states emerging from conflict will only be feasible if intervening states reform their own security policies and practices.

Over the past two decades, in response to the underwhelming results of international development efforts across the Third World, arguments concerning the importance of local ownership have been gaining currency within the international development community. At its core, the discourse around ownership revolves around fundamental questions of agency: who decides, who controls, who implements, and who evaluates. The growing emphasis on local ownership, then, emerged as a critique of mainstream development practice and the broader cult of Western expertise which underpins it. As Joseph Stiglitz argued a decade ago, a vision of development in which all the answers and all the agency are seen to lie in the hands of foreigners is inherently problematic and ultimately self-defeating: ‘We have seen again and again that [local] ownership is essential for successful transformation: policies that are imposed from outside may be grudgingly accepted on a superficial basis, but will rarely be implemented as intended’. Since then, the principle of local ownership has been viewed increasingly as a precondition for effective development assistance, even if
the translation of the principle into actual practice remains an ongoing challenge.

This report analyses the monitoring and evaluation arrangements (M&E) of a community policing project ‘Implementation of Community Policing in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH)'. The field research for this report was carried out in May/June 2008.

This report is one of five case studies carried out as part of the Saferworld project ‘Evaluating for Security: Developing specific guidelines on monitoring and evaluating Security Sector Reform (SSR) interventions'

This handbook and its sister publication, the policy report The Transition to a Just Order: Establishing Local Ownership after Conflict, A Practitioner’s Guide, are based on the findings of a two year long study conducted jointly by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI), in partnership with the Folke Bernadotte Academy (FBA). The study offers a comprehensive analysis of the principle of local ownership, the key dilemmas involved in pursuing local ownership and the challenges and issues that arise when local ownership is being put into practice.

It takes a closer look at strategies and mechanisms for transition in four cases studies: Afghanistan, the Balkans (Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and Kosovo), Timor-Leste and West Africa (Liberia and Sierra Leone).
 
The cases have been selected to illustrate the varying degrees of international involvement in post-conflict justice and security sector reform. Kosovo and Timor-Leste represent scenarios where the international community has taken the lead in taking responsibility for law and order, while West Africa and especially Afghanistan are illustrative of postconflict environments where primacy has rested with local authorities. The study is based on field visits by the authors to all the case study countries with
the exception of Timor-Leste and numerous interviews with local stakeholders, practitioners, policy makers and established academics working on justice and security sector issues. The study has also benefited greatly from discussions which took place in a workshop held in Stockholm in May 2006 as well as a rigorous peer review process. The handbook uses the findings in the case studies and examples from these peacebuilding processes to highlight some of the key challenges.

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