Question: How do you re-establish a legal system in Bosnia-Herzegovina when most of the country's law texts, case records, the presses they were printed on, and even the libraries and courthouses they were stored in were destroyed during almost four years of war?
Answer: Replace that paper-based infrastructure with a new digital one that requires only computers and Internet access. That's the theory, at least, behind Project Bosnia, an initiative spearheaded by Villanova Law School to provide computers to Bosnian judges and other legal professionals so they can communicate with each other as well as legal scholars, institutions, and databases around the world.
"Bosnia needs stability, which requires a rule of law, which requires legislative bodies and communications," says April Major, director of technology at the Villanova Center for Information Law and Policy, the university's cutting-edge research and development department devoted to finding ways to use computer technology for legal applications. "That's where we come in. We aim to leapfrog rebuilding all the presses and libraries by putting it on the Net."
The idea was born in January 1996, when a delegation of law professors from the University of Sarajevo visited Villanova and were sold on the Internet as a potential solution to their problems by Villanova professor Henry Perritt, a former telecommunications adviser to President Clinton. Since then, Project Bosnia has collected more 100 computers - mostly low-end 286 and 386 models donated by local law firms - and delivered them to the Sarajevo law school and elsewhere.
The focus of Villanova's efforts, however, is on two institutions judged most ripe to benefit from the Internet: the Bosnian federation's Constitutional Court - roughly analogous to the US Supreme Court - and its Human Rights Ombudsman's office, charged with monitoring and enforcing human rights accords.
As with attempts to rebuild anything in Bosnia, though, progress has been slow. With grants from the Soros Foundation and the US government, the Villanovans have provided high-end Pentium machines and specialized legal software to all the key players at the court and ombudsman's office. But those systems have only been online since early this month, when Major went to Sarajevo to install Netscape and email programs on the computers, and rigged up dedicated 28.8Kbps lines to connect them to the city's only ISP, at the University of Sarajevo.
Some obstacles have been technical. Bosnia's crackly, unreliable phone lines were never up to US standards in the first place, much less so after their wartime battering. And they are all controlled by the state-monopoly telephone company, which has been chary about opening up lines for Internet access.
"They want to retain their monopoly. It's left-over communist thinking," says Ken Mortensen, a founding member of Project Bosnia.
There is already a functioning electronic communication network in place in Sarajevo - Zamirnet, a patched-together improv that kept the city connected to the outside world all through the war. Zamirnet's architecture, however, is inadequate for what Project Bosnia envisions: It's essentially just a store-and-forwarding system for email and newsgroups that does not provide full Net access.
But the main threat to the project's potential success is politics. Under the Dayton Peace Accord that halted the war, Bosnia is one country divided into two federations, one run by Serbs, the other by a federation of Muslims and Croats. So far, there has been virtually no cooperation between the two entities. For this reason, says Villanova's Perritt, Project Bosnia has focused not on national-level institutions but federation-level ones, such as the Constitutional Court and ombudsman's office.
But even within the Muslim-Croat federation, there has been little cooperation, much distrust, and even occasional violence between the ruling groups. The territories dominated by each ethnic group still function largely as separate mini-states.
When the federation government itself is barely functioning, what chance do institutions like courts and ombudsman's offices have?
So far, admits Srdjan Kisic of the ombudsman's office, the office has intervened successfully in only a handful of cases, helping people get back wrongfully seized apartments. Meanwhile, the Constitutional Court has yet to hear a single case. Still, building up a legal infrastructure online is "an absolutely useful and good idea," says Kisic. "But how it will be realized, we'll have to see."
"The general problem with computer-based projects set up in Sarajevo by outside organizations is that people there don't use them, or don't know or care about them," says Ivo Skoric, a veteran cyberactivist and webmaster for the Balkans Pages. "But something specifically targeted like this might work better."
The project has caught the interest of jurists in other Eastern European countries trying to develop their legal systems in the aftermath of Communism. Perritt and his crew have started a series of spin-off projects in other countries, helping Hungary, Slovakia, Russia, the Czech Republic, Macedonia, Croatia, and Slovenia get their own constitutional courts online, and linking them all together under the rubric of Villanova's Central and Eastern European Civic Institution Locator .
"Even if Bosnia ultimately splits up," says Major, "what we have started can serve as a model for each of the three parts. They can just take the computers over their new borders and use them from there."
