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

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.

In a new JUSTINT article published in the Journal of Genocide Research which analyses the war crimes jurisprudence of Serbian courts through 164 final judgements issued between 1999 and 2019, Professor Denisa Kostovicova, Lanabi La Lova, and Timothy Waters show how redactions in war crimes judgements obstruct transparency, prevent reckoning with past violence, and highlight limits of digital data for quantitative analysis.

Abstract

"Drawing on an analysis of 164 final judgements issued between 1999 and 2019, we show that courts employ anonymization 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 also 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 harmonized 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 analyze 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 materials. The inconsistent anonymization 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 standardize redaction practices, and that digitization 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."