Croatia

Croatia ratified the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention in 1998. Since then, it has undertaken various demining activities and succeeded in removing many of the anti-personnel landmines on its territory. A number of different reasons may have led to such compliance with IHL. They include: the awareness that these actions are likely to have beneficial and long-term consequences – for the socio-economic development of the country, for instance; support and political pressure from a broad range of external actors, such as other states.

Various measures have been put in place in Croatia to search for people who went missing during the armed conflict of 1991–1995 in the former Yugoslavia. These yielded concrete results in a number of cases: numerous dead bodies were recovered and identified. The families of missing people, and civil society, played an important role in resolving missing-persons cases. All these actions – which demonstrated respect for IHL – might have contributed to healing some of the trauma caused by war.