Prosecuting Hate. Steve Williamson and Karen McClelland welcome Attorney Mik Jordahl and special guest, Judge Camille Bibles to discuss her experiences in international criminal law. Currently a federal magistrate judge, Bibles previously prosecuted war criminals as a trial attorney at The Hague.
After describing the various types of charges that come before the International Criminal Court, she notes, “The offenses that I prosecuted were genocide, crimes against humanities, and, really, war crimes and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions.”
Some of those cases involved the massacre at Srebrenica – the genocidal killing of more than 8,000 Bosnian men and boys during the Bosnian War following the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. “It was a brutal, brutal, brutal offense and spanned over…the killing machine operated over a series of days in July of 1995.”
The cases resulted in many convictions of Serbian commanders and the individuals involved including their leader, Ratko Mladic.
Asked how seeing evidence of the horrors presented during the trials had impacted her personally, she says, “Many, many things were difficult for all of us, and I think we all get hit differently. For me, the first time that I had a refugee in who had been sent back into his area – the idea was we were going to repopulate the areas where Bosnian Muslims and others had been driven out of – when he started crying, begging me to take him back to the United States, and described to me what it was like every night being there. And really talking to the witnesses – people who had been severely traumatized, people who had survived massacres – is extremely difficult. People who lost everything. It is work that takes a toll on the people engaged in it.”