Published on Exchange Chambers, 17 July 2025.

“30 years fighting for the truth and seeking justice. The truth means finding the bones of our children and justice means ensuring the criminals pay for their crimes. In the end truth always prevails.”
— Munira Subasic

Each year on 10th July, the day before the commemoration of the Srebrenica genocide, coffins are carried through the town and placed into the red earth of the cemetery — containing newly discovered remains of more than 8,000 victims, killed thirty years ago in July 1995. Munira Subasic’s husband, son, and another 22 members of her extended family were among them.

Similar scenes are witnessed every April in Rwanda — where the remains of some of the more than 800,000 people slaughtered in the frenzied 100-day genocide of the Tutsis are still being discovered and ceremonially interned.

So it is vital that today — 17th July, the World Day for International Justice — we are asked to “see,” to focus on, and to renew our commitment to the protection of human rights, the upholding of the rule of law, and the ongoing fight for justice for victims. As Benjamin Franklin said: “Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.”

The International Criminal Court

Today was first declared as the World Day for International Justice in 2010 at the Review Conference of the Rome Statute in Kampala — chosen as the anniversary of the adoption of the Rome Statute in 1998, and the establishment of the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Since the ICC formally opened in 2003, thirty-three cases have been brought, resulting in thirty-seven arrest warrants, 10 convictions and 4 acquittals. Currently outstanding warrants include warrants for the arrests of Omar al-Bashir, Vladimir Putin, his Children’s Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova, Mohamed Deif, Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant — covering alleged war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Sudan, Libya, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, and elsewhere.

The Weight of Waiting

Radovan Karadzic was not convicted for his part in the Srebrenica genocide until 2016 — twenty-one years after the atrocity was committed. As Bida Smajlovic said at the time: “This came too late. There is no sentence that could compensate for the horrors we went through or for the tears of only one mother, let alone thousands.”

As lawyers our duty today, of all days, is to advocate for international criminal justice, to fight against impunity, and to remind us all that no one should be above the law. In the end justice, as well as truth, must prevail. The duty to ensure it does rests with us.