Bill Stuebner, Affiliate Professor in the Peace Operations Policy Program, has been working for the past eight months on helping to establish a truth commission for Bosnia and Herzegovina. With his colleague Neil Kritz, Director of the Rule of Law Program at the United States Institute of Peace, Stuebner has succeeded in winning sponsorship for the project from the three speakers of the Bosnian House of Representatives and the eight major political parties in the Parliament. Monthly sessions with the eight party-appointed representatives have been going on since September, and they expect to complete work on draft legislation by the spring, after which it will be submitted to the public for discussion and suggested amendment. If all goes as planned, the draft legislation will be passed into law in the fall, and the commission will begin working by early 2007.

Professor Stuebner, who has been working in Bosnia and Herzegovina since the beginning of the war there in 1992, sees the truth commission as a supplement, not an alternative, to prosecution. It is estimated that more than 10,000 suspects could be tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity, an unmanageable case load that the State prosecutor has stated would take him 300 years to clear.

Professor Stuebner is also involved with the Grand Mufti of Bosnia and Herzegovina in setting up a Bosnian counterpart to the United States Institute of Peace and organizing a joint Bosnian-American human rights monitoring project in Darfur, Sudan. He has been working in the Balkans since May 1992, first as a humanitarian assistance officer for the Department of Defense and the U.S. Agency for International Development. Later, he served as special adviser to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and chief of staff and senior deputy for human rights of the OSCE Mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina.