[JURIST] Serbia on Saturday reportedly asked [AP report] Russia to veto a British UN Security Council [official website] resolution that would call the incident during the Bosnian War in which 8000 Muslim men were murdered genocide. Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic sent a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin [BBC profile] pleading that the country vote “no” on the resolution next week. Many Western countries and Russia have been debating in the UN over whether the incident, which occurred during the war in Srebrenica in July 1995, should be labeled genocide. UN courts have already labeled the massacre genocide. The move is considered to have political motivations since Nikolic is more pro-Russia while those opposing Nikolic’s party have stronger desires to lean more towards building ties with the European Union.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) [official website] and the Balkan States continue to prosecute those accused of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity that left more than 100,000 people dead and millions displaced during the Balkan conflict of the 1990s. In April the Prosecutor’s Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina indicted [JURIST report] 10 former Bosnian-Serb soldiers for war crimes committed during the Balkan conflict of the 1990s. Also in April Bosnian prosecutors indicted three men [JURIST report] for crimes committed against more than 300 Serb civilians between April 1992 and July 1993. In February the International Court of Justice ruled [JURIST report] that Serbia and Croatia did not commit genocide against one another’s citizens during the 1990s war.