The Last Address of Responsibility

I represent victims. I do not deal with the causes of a war. I deal with its consequences.

That distinction matters more than it seems. Causes belong to historians and politicians. Consequences belong to people: to their bodies, their families, their savings. A consequence has an address. Someone lives there.

The law exists to connect that address to another one: the address of the party responsible. Every harm has an author. Not every author can be brought before a court.

I.

The author disappears in four ordinary ways.

Immunity. International organisations and foreign states are generally immune from the jurisdiction of national courts. In 2013, in Stichting Mothers of Srebrenica v. the Netherlands, the European Court of Human Rights accepted that the United Nations was immune from suit in Dutch courts, even over the genocide at Srebrenica.

Diffusion. Some harms have thousands of authors. Polluted air. A warming climate. No single source caused this illness in this person.

Disappearance. Companies dissolve. Records are destroyed. Witnesses die.

Time. The law sets deadlines for claims. Some illnesses appear after the deadline has passed.

In each case the harm remains. The defendant does not.

II.

A harm without a defendant is not a harm without responsibility. The European Convention on Human Rights does not only prohibit states from harming people. It requires them to protect people from serious risks that the authorities knew about, or should have known about. The Strasbourg court has built this principle case by case for more than thirty years.

Guerra v. Italy, 1998. Residents near a chemical factory in Manfredonia were not told of the risks. Violation.

Öneryildız v. Turkey, 2004. A methane explosion at a rubbish tip in Istanbul destroyed the homes built beside it and killed 39 people. The authorities had been warned by an expert report. They did nothing. Violation of the right to life.

Budayeva v. Russia, 2008. A mudslide struck a mountain town. The warnings had been ignored and the defences left unrepaired. Violation of the right to life.

Brincat v. Malta, 2014. Workers at a state-owned ship-repair yard were exposed to asbestos for decades. The state knew, or should have known, of the danger from at least the early 1970s. It did not act. Violation.

Cordella v. Italy, 2019. Residents of Taranto lived for years beside the emissions of the Ilva steelworks. The authorities neither protected them nor gave them an effective remedy. Violation.

In none of these cases did the court have to find that the state created the danger. The question was different. What did the authorities know? What did they do with that knowledge?

III.

The same principle explains a line of Italian cases.

Italian soldiers who served in Bosnia and Kosovo, and who later developed cancers, did not sue the forces that fired depleted uranium ammunition. They sued their own state. The question before the courts was whether the Ministry of Defence knew of the risks of the environments into which it sent its people, and whether it protected them. In October 2018, the Court of Cassation upheld the ministry’s liability in the case of a young soldier who died of leukaemia after serving in Bosnia. In July 2026, a court in Velletri ruled for a retired officer who served in Kosovo. As reported, it held that absolute scientific certainty was not required.

The same structure underlies claims now pending in Serbia against the Republic of Serbia, as successor of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, on behalf of people who served in the areas targeted in 1999. I act for claimants in those proceedings. Each will be decided on its own evidence.

The principle is simple. If a state sends people into a danger it knew about, it owes them protection. If it did not protect them, it owes them a remedy.

Its limits are equally clear. The state is not liable for everything that happens on its territory. The risk must have been known, or knowable. Reasonable measures must have been available and not taken. And the failure must be connected to the harm.

IV.

Time is the obstacle least discussed.

Limitation periods are sensible. Evidence decays. Defendants are entitled to certainty. But the rules were written for injuries that are visible when they happen. Mesothelioma, the cancer caused by asbestos, typically appears decades after exposure.

In Howald Moor v. Switzerland (2014), a worker exposed to asbestos in the 1960s and 1970s was diagnosed in 2004 and died in 2005. The Swiss courts held his family’s claims time-barred, because the limitation period ran from the date of exposure. By the time he knew he was ill, the law regarded the matter as closed. The European Court of Human Rights found a violation of the right of access to a court. Where science shows that a person cannot know of an illness until long after exposure, that fact must count when the deadline is calculated.

The principle reaches beyond asbestos. Radiation, chemicals, contamination: every harm with a long latency meets the same clock.

V.

In cases like these, evidence is where the argument begins.

The party that knew most about the risk — the employer, the authority, the operator of the site — usually holds the records. The person who fell ill usually holds a diagnosis and a memory. Expert evidence is expensive. Where no domestic institution can carry out a specialised analysis, Serbian civil procedure allows expert evidence to be obtained abroad.

The standard of proof in civil law is not scientific certainty. It is probability: that a fact is more likely than not. The Italian courts applied exactly that standard. A court that demands laboratory certainty from a sick claimant has raised the standard of proof without saying so, and has raised it against the party least able to meet it.

The consequences of delay are concrete. In the south of Serbia, poor people with cancer sell the last things they own to pay for treatment. Meanwhile the question of who answers for their illness remains open.

VI.

The central question is responsibility. A victim needs more than recognition of harm. The harm must be connected to a responsible party.

Immunity can bar one defendant. It does not erase the duties of others. Diffusion makes individual attribution difficult. It does not relieve the state of the duty to regulate a known risk. Time makes evidence harder to assemble. It should not make an illness legally invisible because it appeared late.

The state is not the author of every harm. It is often the last party that knew, that could have acted, and that can still be required to answer. When every other door is closed, that one remains open.

Justice is reachable. It takes time. And justice has to be worked for.

The opening lines and the closing line render statements Srđan Aleksić made publicly (Danas, 14 August 2022 and 30 March 2023). He represents claimants in depleted-uranium proceedings in Serbia.

ECtHR: Guerra and Others v. Italy [GC] (19 Feb 1998) · Öneryildız v. Turkey [GC] (30 Nov 2004) · Budayeva and Others v. Russia (20 Mar 2008) · Howald Moor and Others v. Switzerland (11 Mar 2014) · Brincat and Others v. Malta (24 Jul 2014) · Cordella and Others v. Italy (24 Jan 2019) · Stichting Mothers of Srebrenica v. the Netherlands (dec., 11 Jun 2013). Italian Court of Cassation, Vacca (Oct 2018); Velletri court (Jul 2026), as reported.