In July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces captured the UN-declared “safe area” of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia. In the days that followed, Bosniak men and boys were separated from women and children and systematically killed. Many victims were buried in mass graves and later reburied in secondary sites to conceal evidence.
Srebrenica became a defining accountability case in post‑Cold‑War Europe. The ICTY’s Krstić judgment treated the mass killings as genocide and helped establish legal and factual baselines later used across related prosecutions.
This entry focuses on the crime pattern (capture of a protected enclave, separation of civilians, mass executions, and concealment through reburials) and on the role of international justice mechanisms in documenting it.