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The Hague, 11 July 2026 – As families gather today at the Srebrenica Memorial Cemetery in Potočari to bury the newly identified remains of ten victims of the 1995 Srebrenica Genocide, the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) joins them in honoring all those who were murdered.
This year’s commemoration follows the establishment by the United Nations of the International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica. In creating this International Day, the United Nations has reaffirmed the importance of preserving the facts established through judicial proceedings, honoring the victims, supporting survivors, combating genocide denial, preventing the glorification of convicted war criminals, and promoting education to help prevent future atrocities.
Over the past three decades, the effort to account for the missing has become one of the clearest demonstrations of these principles in practice. More than 90 percent of the more than 8,000 victims of the Srebrenica Genocide have been accounted for through scientific investigation and DNA-based identification. This unprecedented achievement has enabled families to recover and bury their loved ones while establishing an authoritative factual record that has supported criminal accountability and upheld the historical truth of the Genocide.
“The investigations into the Srebrenica Genocide demonstrated that even the most systematic attempts to conceal mass crimes can be overcome through science, independent institutions, international cooperation, and the rule of law,” said ICMP Director-General Kathryne Bomberger. “The painstaking work of recovering, identifying, and documenting thousands of victims helped establish the facts of the Genocide through judicial processes. That factual record remains one of the strongest safeguards against denial and historical revisionism. While approximately 1,000 people remain missing, States continue to have an obligation under international law to undertake effective investigations to account for them.”
The progress that has been achieved has been driven by the determination of families from communities across Bosnia and Herzegovina, whose insistence that every victim be found, identified, and returned transformed the international response to the issue of missing persons. The perseverance of families demonstrated that accounting for the missing is not only a humanitarian imperative, but also an essential component of justice and the rule of law.
Accounting for the missing from Srebrenica has been one of the most comprehensive scientific and investigative efforts ever undertaken following a mass atrocity. From the systematic recovery of human remains to the pioneering large-scale application of DNA identification, investigators connected victims from the locations where their remains were recovered to locations where they were executed, documenting the deliberate removal and reburial of bodies in secondary and tertiary graves in an effort to conceal the crime. By linking each identified victim to the circumstances of death and location of recovery, the process generated forensic and genetic evidence that supported investigations and was presented in 35 criminal trials before domestic courts and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Together with judicial findings, this evidence established one of the most complete factual records ever made in relation to a mass atrocity.
Working with domestic authorities, families of the missing, civil society and the international community, ICMP helped to develop and implement this integrated, DNA based scientific approach and has helped to identify approximately 7,000 victims of the Srebrenica Genocide. The methodologies pioneered in Bosnia and Herzegovina have since been applied worldwide in support of governments addressing large numbers of missing persons from conflict, human rights abuses, disasters, organized crime, migration, and other causes.
Today, ICMP continues to help the authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina to locate and identify those who are still missing, ensuring that scientific evidence supports judicial processes.
Launched on the 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, ICMP’s Geography of Genocide shows how decades of forensic archaeological, anthropological, genetic, and investigative work exposed the systematic effort to conceal the crime. The interactive platform illustrates the movement of victims’ remains from primary to secondary and tertiary graves and enables families to find out where the remains of their loved ones were recovered while helping the broader public to understand how scientific evidence established the historical record.
Thirty-one years after the Srebrenica Genocide, the work is not yet complete. Sustaining the effort to account for those who are still missing is an essential part of meeting States’ legal obligations, preserving the integrity of the historical record, and reinforcing the principles of truth and accountability.
About ICMP
ICMP is a treaty-based intergovernmental organization with Headquarters in The Hague, the Netherlands. Its mandate is to secure the cooperation of governments and others in locating missing persons resulting from conflict, human rights abuses, disasters, organized crime, migration, and other causes, and to assist them in doing so.
