Unwritten Lives

Posts tagged with: Bosnia and Herzegovina Show All

Same-sex civil partnerships 20 years on: “We don’t just want the cake; we want the recipe, too. Equal slices for everyone, no exceptions.”

January 24, 2026 by Adnan Ali & Eric Stobbaerts

Eric and Adnan in Rio — Celebrating Iemanjá, Goddess of the Sea and Queen of the Ocean, Rio de Janeiro, January 2011. Photo: Courtesy of Eric Stobbaerts (left), and Adnan Ali (right).

It has been 20 years since the UK’s first same-sex civil unions took place on 19 December 2005. Adnan Ali and Eric Stobbaerts were one of the first gay couples in London to form a civil partnership on that historic day. They are both busy men with global lives. Unwritten Lives was glad to catch up with them in London, where the couple spoke with Ishtiyaq Shukri.

November 13, 2025 by Eric Stobbaerts

Revisiting the genocide in Srebrenica

White tombstones — Photo by Nancy Hann on Unsplash

Eric Stobbaerts was a senior humanitarian on the ground in the former Yugoslavia from late 1993 to early 1995. Three decades after the Srebrenica genocide in which more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys were killed by Bosnian Serb forces under Ratko Mladic, he remembers the painful failures on the part of the international community that led to the massacre, and the lessons that should have been learned.