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Members of Project Bosnia give special thanks to the American Bar Association's Central East European Law Initiative ("CEELI") office in Sarajevo for their continuous support of our project. It is in large part to their efforts that Project Bosnia has been able to make such impressive progress toward accomplishing our goal of connecting courts in Bosnia via the Internet.

Project Bosnia team members (from left to right) Alex Rozman, IV Ashton, Dean Henry H. Perritt, Jr., and Suzanne Price discuss with Ombudsman Vera Jovanic` of the Federation Ombudsman's Office, the most effective way to utilize the Internet in the enforcement human rights.


       The common good in this case is helping to restore peace to Bosnia and Herzegovina, a country torn apart by ethnic tensions and nationalism emanating from the break up of the former Yugoslavia. Seem lofty and impossible? Some law school faculty, administrators and students at Chicago-Kent College of Law and the Villanova University School of Law don't think so. For more than two years, a student volunteer group led by Chicago-Kent Dean Henry H. Perritt, Jr. and recent Villanova graduate April Major, have been utilizing Internet technology to help restore a rule of law in Bosnia..

     During the war, Bosnia became a land where neighbors suddenly became enemies; where bullets and mortar shells exploded without warning on residential streets; where for days there was no electricity, heat or water; where going to the communal marketplace sometimes ended in death; and where entire families lived in one room. For Bosnian attorneys, judges, professors
and law students, the elements of a legal infrastructure which we so often take for granted have been shattered by war. There, members of the legal community were forced to reform even the most elementary of legal tasks in an environment where law books, law libraries, legal records or legal institutions are merely fading memories.

     While the Dayton Accords and an international military presence have ended the fighting in the region, accomplishing a strong and lasting peace may prove impossible unless a rule of law is restored successfully. To that end, Project Bosnia is waging a new battle. In an effort to rebuild what was lost in the brutal conflict, citizens from Bosnia and Herzegovina are working vigorously with student-volunteers from the United States to reshape the institutions that will anchor a civil society. Not only are the people of the former Yugoslavia digging out from the horrors of this conflict, they are constructing their political, legal and economic systems from scratch.

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