Professor Bennoune Attends Sarajevo Women's Court

Professor Karima Bennoune attended the Women's Court held on May 7-10 in Sarajevo, Bosnia.  The unique event brought together women from all the countries of the former Yugoslavia to demand justice for crimes committed during the ethnic conflicts fought there from 1991-2001. Professor Bennoune, the only professor from any American law school in attendance, called the event an "important symbolic tribunal."

"Women testified courageously of their experiences of losing family members to massacres, of mass rape and kidnapping, and of ethnic persecution," said Bennoune.  "They demanded that such events never be repeated.   This feminist re-imagining of a court in which women victims were the central focus, in which women were the judges and in which women decided the verdicts and formulated the recommendations, was very inspiring and thought-provoking to me as an international lawyer. "

While in Bosnia, Professor Bennoune also took part in a Feminist Encounter discussion at the University of Sarajevo and visited the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial with members of the peace group Women in Black.

Karima Bennoune is an author, lecturer, teacher, and international law scholar as well as the first Arab-American to be honored with the Derrick A. Bell Award from the Section on Minority Groups of the Association of American Law Schools. She recently was awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for her book Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight against Muslim Fundamentalism, now available in paperback from W.W. Norton & Company.