BIRN BiH– Balkan Investigate Reporting Network in Bosnia and Herzegovina
The Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been supporting BIRN since the network began operating, and recognizes its importance, working with justice issues conserning the public in BiH. Most of the support is given from MFA Oslo, but also the Norwegian embassy in Sarajevo supports some of BIRN’s activities through the project fund of the embassy.
BIRN is a group of editors and trainers that enables journalists across the region to produce analytical and investigative journalism, designed to spark debate on European issues.
BIRN is working to have a constant, accurate, objective and unbiased information flow about the war crime trials for all the different actors in the transitional justice process in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Justice in BiH 2006 – Media, Civil Society & War Crimes Trials is a project created by BIRN, and its objectives reamained the same: a viable and independent media offering consistent, objective, and balanced information about war crimes trials and justice issues to the citizens; a well-informed civil society about the issues of the past in order to prevent manipulation; and an open and transparent judiciary as a pre-requisite for a successful completion of the transitional period.
As a part of this project, the Justice Report was created. It is a specialized reporting service created to provide accurate and balanced information about each trial before the Court. The Justice Report was created with a two-fold aim: to provide immediate information to all interested individuals as well as to create an archive of the trials and developments within the courts for the future generations. The report is published both in local and English languages.
About 2000 subscribers from the media, civil society and government signed up for the first issue of the Justice Report. Over 600 international criminal justice experts, professors, international community representatives, ICTY employees and other individuals signed up fot the English language service. An estimated 70 per cent of the employees of the Registry of the Court of BiH also subscribes to the Justice Report.
Since its beginning, the Justice Report has published reports concerning the secrecy surronding the Foca rape cases, where the Court decided to hear the two main trials at the time behind closed doors. After the publication the Court decided to open one of the two trials to the public. Another article reveled the inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the law on transfer of cases from ICTY to the Court of BiH which prompted the international legal experts to correct the omissions.
In March, the puclication’s website http://engl.bim.ba/ with daily updates on justice issues, recorded over 55.000 hits.