A European court has ordered authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina to remove a church built on the property of a Muslim family that fled genocide.
In 1998, a Serbian Orthodox church was built on land owned by a man killed during the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, during which over 8,000 predominantly Muslim Bosniaks were slaughtered by a Bosnian Serb military unit. In March 2018, that man’s widow and 13 other family members, all of whom were forced to flee genocide in the 1990s, appealed to the European Court of Human Rights to get the church removed from their property.
The court ruled Tuesday that authorities must comply with prior rulings that had granted full restitution of property to the family. The government of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s failure to enforce those decisions lacked justification and constituted a violation of property rights.
The court added that the church must be removed from the land within three months and ordered the government of Bosnia and Herzegovina to pay 5,000 euros to the widow and 2,000 euros to each of the other family members.
