The UN General Assembly on Thursday adopted a resolution designating July 11 as the International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the Srebrenica Genocide in 1995.

The resolution was adopted by a recorded vote of 84 in favor, 19 against, and 68 abstentions. It designates July 11 as the “International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica”, to be observed annually, and condemns any denial of the Srebrenica genocide as a historical event as well as calling on member states to preserve facts, including through their educational systems. Volker Türk, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, welcomed the resolution as “an important step towards promotion of a culture of remembrance and peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and in the region.”

The draft resolution was sponsored by Germany and Rwanda. Antje Leendertse, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Germany to the UN, said that the resolution was introduced to honor the victims and support the survivors of the genocide. Countering some “false allegations” against the initiative, she expressed that the resolution “is not directed against anybody,” including Serbia, which is “a valued member of this Organization.”

The text of the resolution followed the template of the UN General Assembly’s previous resolution designating April 7 as the International Day of Reflection on the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.

Serbia voted against the adoption of the resolution, with their President Aleksandar Vučić asserting the text was “highly politicized” and would “open a Pandora’s box,”. Vučić called on all member states to vote against it. He further questioned Germany’s representative on why this resolution was being proposed when individual legal liability had already been delivered and commented:

When we wanted to discuss the bombing of Serbia in 1999, they said to us “don’t look at the past, look at the future – it happened 25 years ago.” Two days after that, we found out that they were preparing this kind of resolution relating to events even four years prior to [1999]… When they have some needs – political needs, they can go deep into the past. When someone else is referring to the past, in that case the facts – they don’t matter.

After the resolution was adopted, President Vučić remarked that the Thursday session marked the first time that a vote on a resolution about genocide was not adopted unanimously in the General Assembly. 

The Srebrenica genocide occurred in July 1995, where more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys were killed and up to 30,000 Bosnian Muslim women, children, and elderly persons were displaced in Srebrenica during the Bosnian War. Before the massacre, the UN Security Council had adopted Resolution 819 in April 1993 declaring Srebrenica a “safe area.” The massacre was perpetrated by the Bosnian Serb Army of Republika Srpska (VRS). The Scorpions, a Serbian paramilitary unit active during wartime, also participated in the massacre. The massacre of Muslims in Srebrenica by Republika Srpska was recognized as an act of genocide by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2007.