Humanized Law but Dehumanized Human Beings
There are judicial decisions that illuminate the dark corners of the world and force us to ask whether the law is still capable of containing human brutality. The recent judgment of the Swedish Court of Appeal is one of them: for the first time, a court has upheld a conviction for genocide based exclusively on the forced transfer of children from one group to another. This is not a technical detail; it is a reminder that destroying a people does not always require bullets or extermination camps: it suffices to tear its children away, to sever the spiritual continuity that binds them to their community, to interrupt the thread connecting the living and the dead.
The case, centered on crimes committed against the Yazidi community, reveals the mixture of horror and legal precision that characterizes the great moments of international law. A Swedish citizen who joined ISIS in 2013 has been sentenced to twelve years in prison for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes committed against nine Yazidi victims, six of them under the age of seven. The ruling opens a clear path for prosecuting the forced transfer of children in future armed conflicts, and sends an unequivocal message: even in environments torn apart by war, individual responsibility does not dissolve. The legal history of the twentieth century insists on reminding us that crimes do not remain suspended in a vacuum; they project themselves into time, mark generations, and affect the spiritual fabric of entire peoples.
But the case also reminds us that justice often arrives late, when it can no longer save but only attempt to repair. In the real world, the law moves forward while barbarism runs. This uneven race becomes visible again in the investigations now resurfacing in Sarajevo, where time has sedimented not only horror but also the risk of oblivion. The legal clock and the clock of suffering rarely beat at the same rhythm.
The account of retired Bosnian Edin Subasic has once again brought to light one of the most disturbing episodes of the siege of Sarajevo: the alleged human safaris. The idea is so unbearable that it is hard to utter, yet it still demands examination. According to testimonies, Italian civilians may have traveled to Bosnia during the 1990s to pay for the opportunity to shoot at defenseless civilians living under the longest siege suffered by a capital city in modern history.
Subasic himself recalls having seen, in military interrogations, the testimony of a young Serbian prisoner: he was traveling by bus with a group of Serbs and five Italians equipped with hunting gear. One of them—he said—was not a mercenary, but a “hunter”: someone who paid for the chance to kill.
It is difficult to overstate what such an account means. It forces us to cross the thin line between war and something even more monstrous: killing as entertainment. If confirmed, this would be one of the most extreme expressions of twentieth-century dehumanization—a perversion of war turned into a private spectacle, a total rupture of empathy and of the minimum responsibility that allows us to recognize one another as human beings.
The former mayor of Sarajevo, who as a child lived through the siege in one of the neighborhoods most devastated by snipers, filed a complaint with the Bosnian Prosecutor’s Office. She gathered new evidence, added testimonies from members of international peacekeeping missions, and maintained pressure so the case would not disappear into bureaucratic labyrinths. And yet, more than thirty years later, the key witnesses have not been heard by any prosecutor’s office—neither in Bosnia, nor in Italy, nor before international tribunals. Time, which should help clarify facts, often becomes the greatest ally of forgetting, a silent form of re-victimization.
Faced with all this, the law finds itself at a crossroads: it must protect the human in a world where too many have shown themselves capable of renouncing their own humanity. And it must do so knowing that there are harms that cannot be healed only with judgments. A legal system that aspires to be more than a sanctioning machine must understand the temporal depth of suffering—its roots in memory, in identity, in the ties between the living and the dead.
Yazidi communities know that justice always comes after suffering. The inhabitants of Sarajevo remember weekends when gunfire intensified, as if the city were a shooting range.
If we want truly humanized law, we must first accept that human beings can dehumanize ourselves with terrifying ease. It is not enough to define crimes or enact norms; it is necessary to recognize that behind each case file there are broken lives, unfinished mourning, wounds that continue to fester decades later. And it is necessary to recognize that the function of law does not end with judging: it also consists in preserving memory, keeping alive the promise that suffering will not go unanswered, sustaining public trust that justice is more than a belated ritual.
The judgment offers a spark of hope: it shows that, even late, the law can open unprecedented paths to protect the most vulnerable. The case of the human safaris reminds us, by contrast, of what happens when justice is delayed too long: shadows grow, witnesses age, evidence scatters, and humanity risks growing accustomed to the unacceptable.
Carlos Gil Gandía, Professor of Public International Law and International Relations, UMU
