Prosecutor v. Kunarac et al. (Appeal)

During an armed conflict, Serbian forces gathered all the Muslims in a town, separating the men from the women and children. The Muslim men were killed or sent elsewhere. The women and children were kept at central locations in the town. Many of the women and children as young as 12 were enslaved by Serbian soldiers for months and subjected to repeated and often sadistic sexual violence. Dragoljub Kunarac, Radomir Kovač, and Zoran Vuković (defendants) were Serbian soldiers with positions of authority in the area. All three men facilitated, encouraged, or personally participated in sexual violence against numerous Muslim women and girls. The prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) charged all three men with multiple crimes, including the crime of torture. After a trial by the ICTY’s trial chamber, the men were convicted of committing torture and most of the other charged crimes. The three men appealed to the ICTY’s appeal chamber. On appeal, the men accepted the trial chamber’s definition of the crime of torture, which was (1) an intentional act (2) that inflicts severe suffering (3) for a prohibited purpose, such as intimidating the victim or to discriminate against the victim’s religion. However, Kunarac and Vuković argued that the prosecutor had not presented any evidence that their individual victims had suffered severe mental or physical pain or suffering. The men also argued that the evidence showed that their acts were motivated by a desire for sexual gratification, not a motivation to inflict suffering or to discriminate against Muslims.