A unique look into the investigation of war crimes was given to students and the public by the Olomouc Faculty of Law’s Centre for International Humanitarian and Operational Law (CIHOL). A film screening of The Investigator: Demons of the Balkan War and follow-up discussion with Vladimír Dzuro, the main protagonist of the film, attracted an audience of over two hundred at the faculty.
Vladimír Dzuro took an active part in UN peacekeeping in the former Yugoslavia starting in April 1995, and then spent more than nine years in the post of Chief of the Office of Internal Oversight Services at the UN in New York. In the documentary The Investigator: Demons of the Balkan War, which is inspired by the book of the same name, he returns to the places of his investigations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia. At the screening, Petr Stejskal of CIHOL, the main coordinator of the event, explained the legal aspects of arresting Slavko Dokmanović, the mayor of Vukovar.
The organisers were able to invite another VIP guest to the programme – Michal Vývoda, Senior Advisor OSINT (Open Source Intelligence Tools), European Union Advisory Mission (EUAM) Ukraine – who shared his fresh experiences on investigating war crimes in the era of modern technologies. He also explained the intersections of international humanitarian law, in-country prosecution, and war crimes.
This was Vladimír Dzuro’s second invitation to Olomouc by CIHOL. In 2011, he gave the lecture “Deadly Propaganda: Fake news in the post-conflict environment”, which is still available on the faculty’s YouTube channel (in Czech).
