Law on Genocide Deniers in the House of Peoples of FBiH in Ten Days

The amendment to the Criminal Code of FBiH, according to which anyone who denies genocide on the territory of the Federation of BiH will be criminally liable, could be adopted in the next ten days, confirmed for the BiH news agency Patria Jasmin Duvnjak, Vice-President of the SDA Caucus in the Federal Parliament, who initiated this procedure in October 2011.

The House of Peoples of FBiH, says Duvnjak, will convene in about ten days, when he hopes the law on genocide deniers in BiH will also be adopted. 

According to this new amendment to the Criminal Code of FBiH, anyone who denies genocide committed in this entity on the territory of the Federation will be criminally liable for it. The law applies not only to citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina but also to foreign nationals.

- This law is often misinterpreted in public as a law on Srebrenica. That is not the case. By force of its provisions, this law will be able to punish all persons who deny the genocide in Srebrenica, but also all other crimes in BiH that have been confirmed by final court rulings – explained Duvnjak.

He adds that the application of this law will in no way allow invoking the suppression of freedom of speech, because it is clear that this is a civilizational response to the challenges of nationalism and chauvinism, regardless of which side they come from.

- In this way, the protection of all victims killed on the territory of BiH is realized. This law has no national prefix, it affirms a culture of remembrance instead of a culture of forgetting, and I hope that one day it will be adopted at the state level as well – said Duvnjak, writes Patria.