On 15 and 16 November 2023, in Sarajevo, the OSCE Mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina (Mission) will convene an international conference, Marking the 20th Anniversary of Criminal Justice Reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Two Decades Back, Two Decades Forward (Conference). The Conference will provide a forum for reflection through both scholarly and practical discussions of the reforms made to the criminal justice system in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) in 2003, with a focus on contemporary challenges and ways forward.
Submission guidelines
Please note that efforts to examine wider reforms to the BiH judicial system should address their connections to and impact on criminal justice.
Based on these abstracts, the Mission will invite selected authors to draft full papers that will form the basis for panel discussions during the Conference, which will be attended by approximately 100 domestic and international legal practitioners, academics, members of civil society, and other experts and interested parties.
The Mission will also facilitate the participation of selected authors in the discussion panels and the Conference as a whole.
The selected abstracts will be provided to the Conference participants, and the full papers will be published as a compendium after the Conference.
Submitted abstracts, which should be no more than 500 words, should clearly outline the problem, hypothesis, methodology and paper structure.
As the Conference proceedings will take place in one of the BiH official languages (Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian) and English, with simultaneous translation, abstracts and solicited papers can be drafted in either one of the BiH official languages (Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian) or English.
After their submission, an internal Mission board, supported by external anonymous peer reviewers, will review both the abstracts and the papers and will collaborate with authors to finalise their submissions. Please note this process will not interfere with the editorial autonomy of the respective authors.
The submission of an abstract should be accompanied by the author’s CV.
The Mission will cover all costs related to participation in the Conference for the selected authors. Timeline for the submission of abstracts proposals and papers
Timeline for the submission of abstracts proposals and papers
17 March 2023 – Deadline for submission of abstracts, up to 500 words
14 April, 2023– Notification on selection of abstracts and invitation to submit full papers
16 June 2023– Deadline for submission of full papers, up to 10,000 words
June – August 2023– Peer review of full papers
9 August– Feedback provided to authors based on peer review process
23 August 2023– Deadline for submission of revised full papers
15-16 November 2023– Conference proceedings
Contact information
For additional information or with any questions, and to submit abstracts and CVs, contact the Mission at [email protected].
