Resolution 808 – Inside the Yugoslavia Tribunal

During the 1990s, the world was shaken by the war that was raging in the Balkans. Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II was marked by widespread and grim war crimes. It lasted for almost ten years and left over 130,000 people dead.

In the midst of the atrocities, Resolution 808 was firmly adopted by the United Nations Security Council. It established the Yugoslavia Tribunal, the first ever UN-created war crimes court. While investigators started to collect evidence and prosecutors composed their first indictments, the search for war criminals began. Ultimately, it took 24 years and over 10,800 trial days to bring the 161 indictees to justice.

Resolution 808: Inside the Yugoslavia Tribunal follows the court from the inside, in text and images, tracing the stories of the people who worked within it, as well as the places and objects central to the trials. By combining investigative reporting with human narratives it looks beyond the courtroom, documenting how the war and its aftermath continue to shape everyday life across the Balkans, and giving voice to accounts that have gone largely unrecorded.

Text: Jorie Horsthuis. Photography: Martino Lombezzi. Design and cartography: Carel Fransen. Image curation: Giulia Tornari.

Jorie Horsthuis (1981) is a Dutch journalist and political scientist. She writes about post-conflict regions for international media and is specialised in the Balkans. Martino Lombezzi (1977) is an Italian documentary photographer with an academic formation in Contemporary History; the Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has remained at the center of his interest both as a researcher and as an author. Since the early 2000s, they have been publishing on the Balkans.