Sherif Bassiouni Dies: The Man Who Legally Exposed the Essence of Aggression Against BiH

Cherif Bassiouni, an Egyptian and American law professor who helped establish the International Criminal Court in The Hague, after spending decades researching human rights violations in South Africa and former Yugoslavia, died on September 25 at his home in Chicago. He was 79 years old, reports Patria News Agency.

Cherif Bassiouni was globally regarded as a top world expert in international law.

It is little known that Bassiouni led the team that gathered evidence for indictments against military and political leaders such as Radovan Karadžić, a Bosnian Serb convicted of genocide in 2016.

Bassiouni identified 151 mass graves in Bosnia and Herzegovina at one point and determined that Serbian forces systematically raped Muslim women in Bosnia. His top 84-page report was supported by over 65,000 pages of original material and 3,300 pages of addenda, evidence that was transported from Chicago to The Hague in a cargo container.

"I was not interested in prosecuting ordinary soldiers who commit individual crimes," Bassiouni said on one occasion in 1999 in Chicago.

"I was focused on the leaders who make decisions. So I determined that ethnic cleansing was a policy, that systematic rape was a policy, that the destruction of cultural heritage was a policy, that the destruction of Sarajevo was a systematic process," he said.

Bassiouni incurred the contempt of some political leaders who were trying to negotiate a peace agreement in the region. When he was finally to be appointed Chief Prosecutor of the Tribunal, that process was halted by European diplomats who feared he would directly indict Serbian and Croatian leaders for war crimes, which could disrupt the peace process. 

"What I did not realize is that this is precisely what the British, and to some extent the French and Russians, did not want."

After all, Bosnia and Herzegovina became a place of punishment for criminals, thanks to exceptional people like Cherif Bassiouni.