Enemy of justice? Secrecy in domestic war crimes trials in Serbia

La Lova, Lanabi ORCID: 0000-0002-1918-5258, Kostovicova, Denisa ORCID: 0000-0002-6243-4379 and Waters, Timothy William (2025) Enemy of justice? Secrecy in domestic war crimes trials in Serbia. Journal of Genocide Research. ISSN 1462-3528 (In Press)

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Abstract

Secrecy is an essential element in war crimes trials, as it protects vulnerable individuals and sensitive information, ensuring trials can proceed effectively. However, secrecy often conflicts with principles of public justice, undermining the legitimacy and societal acceptance of trial processes and judgements. This, in turn, can limit the transformative potential of war crimes trials for post-conflict societies. We examine this tension between secrecy and publicity in the war crimes jurisprudence of Serbian courts. Drawing on an analysis of 164 final judgements issued between 1999 and 2019, we show that Serbian courts employ anonymisation excessively and inconsistently. We document a typology of redaction techniques—including electronic patches, manual redactions, and coded substitutions—that are applied inconsistently not only across courts but within individual documents. Similar types of information (such as names of defendants and victims, addresses, or crime locations) are sometimes redacted and sometimes left visible, reflecting the absence of harmonised standards. To assess the broader impact of these practices, we supplement our analysis with fieldwork, including interviews with legal practitioners and civil society actors. We reveal how excessive and erratic redactions of judgements obstruct transparency, impair the capacity of civil society to analyse trials, and constrain efforts to foster critical engagement with war crimes. Our study also reveals the limits of empirical methods when applied to irregularly redacted, digitised materials. The inconsistent and flawed anonymisation precluded the use of advanced statistical techniques and constrained the scope of analysis. This has broader implications for research design in transitional justice, particularly when relying on digital data sources in environments with weak information governance. We conclude that reform is needed to standardise redaction practices, and that digitisation alone cannot substitute for transparency. War crimes trials can only fulfil their social and historical function if protective secrecy is balanced with meaningful public access to court records.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2025 The Author(s)
Divisions:	European Institute
Subjects:	J Political Science H Social Sciences
Date Deposited:	14 Jul 2025 08:18
Last Modified:	14 Jul 2025 08:27
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/128801

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