The United Nations Organisation enjoys absolute immunity from prosecution, the Appeals Chamber of the Hague District Court ruled on Tuesday, rejecting an appeal filed by the Mothers of Srebrenica association against the world body and the Dutch state for failing to prevent the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces in the UN-protected Srebrenica enclave of eastern Bosnia in the summer of 1995.
The association, which gathers 6,000 surviving relatives of the victims of the massacre, sued the United Nations and the Netherlands for failing to prevent the massacre, saying that they had violated the UN convention on genocide. A Dutch UN peacekeeping contingent was deployed in the Srebrenica enclave at the time.
The international conventions establishing the United Nations clearly state that the UN cannot be prosecuted before a national court of a member state, the Hague District Court said in its ruling.
Van Diepen Van der Kroef, the Amsterdam-based law firm that represents the Mothers of Srebrenica, said it would take the issue of UN immunity before the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, according to the German news agency DPA.
