The Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina has temporarily suspended a new school curriculum in the Republika Srpska under which elementary school students would be taught about the “achievements” of convicted war criminals Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadzic.

A statement from the court Friday said that the court found:

[The curricula] would have serious and irremediable detrimental consequences reflected in a potential risk of further segregation and division among pupils of different ethnic communities and an increased feeling of exclusion and marginalisation of pupils from other ethnic communities, which could possibly create an atmosphere of discrimination. … [It could] potentially endanger the human rights of pupils and cause them considerable harm that cannot be remedied retroactively.

The new curriculum was proposed by the education ministry of the Republika Srpska, one of the two autonomous regions of Bosnia and Herezegovina to emerge from the settlement that ended the war of 1992-1995. The Republika Srpska education ministry intended for Bosnia’s history would be retold with a focus on the Serbs’ defensive fight for “liberation” in the war of the 1990s. The curriculum was found by the Constitutional Court to paint convicted war criminals Mladić and Karadzic in a heroic light. The curriculum made no mention of the genocide of the Muslim Bosniaks during the war, or of the convictions of Karadzic and Mladić’ by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

In 2021, Mladić sought to appeal his life sentence, but the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals rejected his application, again reaffirming his guilt.