After visiting the exhumation of a mass grave site in eastern Bosnia on Wednesday, International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) Commissioner Michael Portillo called on the Government of Bosnia-Herzegovina to strive for truth and justice for family members of the missing and for the country of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a whole.BiH Presidency member Sulejman Tihic, Michael Portillo, a former British Secretary of State for Defence, and British Ambassador Matthew Rycroft led a visit of 8 European Union Ambassadors and 11 senior diplomats in Bosnia-Herzegovina to the exhumation of a mass grave containing skeletal remains of some of the victims of the 1995 fall of Srebrenica. The three future directors of the country’s new State-level Missing Persons Institute (MPI), Milan Bogdanic, Marko Jurisic and Amor Masovic, also took part in today’s visit.

“If Bosnia-Herzegovina is to move beyond the hatreds that produced this type of atrocity,” said Mr. Portillo after visiting the…

Forty Prosecutors from all levels of government in Bosnia-Herzegovina visited the identification facilities of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) in Tuzla, eastern Bosnia, on Thursday.The prosecutors were shown details of the process of identification of mortal remains exhumed from individual and mass graves related to the 1992-95 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The State Court is now prosecuting war crimes and better understanding of the identification process, as well as the way secondary grave sites were created, is likely to aid their cases.

ICMP assists local authorities in excavation and exhumation of grave sites and in the identification of remains, using a combination of traditional forensic techniques coupled with cutting edge DNA technology. The introduction of DNA by the ICMP as the basis for finding the identity of remains on a mass scale has radically changed the prospects of identification of the missing. ICMP created a database of DNA profiles…