The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) has donated the Federation Police Directorate with a comprehensive range of equipment that will help to improve forensic capacity of the police in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
At the ICMP premises today, the Head of ICMP’s Western Balkans Program Matthew Holliday presented the Deputy Director of the Police, Ensad Korman with the accompanying documentation for the equipment, which includes a range of precision pipettes, centrifuges, a UV stratalinker, and essential laboratory hardware and furniture.
On this occasion, Ensad Korman thanked ICMP for the donation. “Having in mind financial constraints that we have in our work, this equipment will be new impulse for our work and we will put it to use immediately”.
Matthew Holliday pointed out that one of ICMP’s goals it to strengthen technical forensic capacities in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the current donation to the Federation Police Directorate, following similar donations to the RS Institute of Legal Medicine in 2017 and to Sarajevo University’s Faculty of Natural Science in 2018, will help fulfill that goal. “The equipment donated today will be used for criminal police work and will strengthen the country’s forensic capacities”, Holliday said.
In line with its global mandate, ICMP works with governments to develop their institutional capacity to address the issue of missing persons efficiently and impartially. This May, three staff members from the BIH Agency for Forensic Expertise and Investigations (AFIV) attended a five-day, observational training at ICMP’s DNA Laboratory in The Hague. In June this year, ICMP ran the Workshop titled “Best Practices of Exhumation and Examination of Human Remains in Bosnia and Herzegovina” in Banja Luka to build capacities of the Pathologists from the RS.
Holliday noted that ICMP, with the support of its donors: the EU, Sweden, the UK and USAID, will continue to support the process of accounting for persons missing as a result of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia at the state-level in Bosnia and Herzegovina – a law-based and non-discriminatory process which has already yielded remarkable results. “Of the 31,000 persons who were missing in 1995, more than 23,000 have been found and ICMP will continue to assist authorities in BiH to account for the remaining 8,000 which are still missing”, Holliday concluded.
