Beograd

The largest and unfinished Serbian Orthodox church in Serbia. I definitely didn't take this opportunity for granite and I marbled at how impressive the building is.

After visiting with NDC on Monday, we began our trek to Belgrade. We stopped back in Sarajevo to pick up luggage that didn't fit in our bus to Mostar and to get some lunch. Afterwards, it was about a 7 hour drive to Belgrade. I spent the next morning writing our second paper, which asked us to come up with a hypothetical program that the OHR could enact to help re-enfranchise youth in BiH. Tuesday afternoon involved a walking tour of downtown Belgrade with our TA. The church above was at one end of the tour. The tour ended at the other side of Belgrade, at a fort overlooking the rivers Sava and Danube:

It was back to the paper after the tour.

Wednesday morning, we embarked out to the Serbian War Crimes Court. We were able to visit their largest court room, but we obviously couldn't take any pictures. I thought it was interesting that there was about a 2:1 ratio of desks and computers for the defense to the prosecution. As we learned from our host, that particular court room hosts large organized crime trials where there can be as many as 20-30 defendants. They even had separate galleries for families of the victims and families of the defendants.


After seeing the courtroom, we went upstairs to a conference room for a presentation and Q&A period. Although the court has resolved a lot of war crimes cases, they still have about 50 cases left to resolve. On a more legal nerd level, it was interesting for me to hear about how the Serbian legal system adopted some Anglo Saxon/Common Law approaches to trying war crimes and organized crime. When he started talking about collective responsibility and joint criminal enterprises as they apply under the Pinkerton Rule, I started having flashbacks to my Criminal Law class.

As people started asking questions about how and why the courts can hold military leaders responsible for the actions of individual soldiers, I was reminded of previous discussions I have been involved in that revolve around individual actors and organizations. For example, last spring I had a great discussion with some fellow interns and a detainee policy maker from the DOD about how the US should handle "enemy combatants". Should they be detained indefinitely as essentially POWs, or should their cases be brought before a court? If their cases are brought before a court, should it be a civilian court or a military tribunal? And so on. While we weren't able to come to any conclusions, it appeared to me that the difference was that enemy combatants were acting as part of a larger organization that had declared war on the United States, which makes their actions fall under the laws of war. The laws of war, I discovered, are not really within the purview of civilian courts in the justice system. That leaves some combination of detention and potentially a tribunal.

But I digress. If you're confused, we were essentially discussing the question and precedent under Boumediene v. Bush (2008). What it boils down to is the organizational affiliation of the individual, i.e. whether or not they are in the military and what status they have in that organization. It applies to general organizational culture and leadership as well.

Last night, I went out with my scavenger hunt group for some dinner and later went to the only Irish pub in Belgrade- The Three Carrots.

Lucas out.