Commission for Real Property Claims of Displaced Persons and Refugees

The Problem

When the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina ended, hundreds of thousands of people had been driven from their homes. The Dayton Peace Agreement, the accord that ended the conflict, included a mandate in Annex 7 to restore property rights to displaced persons and refugees. But restoring property rights requires a system: a way to collect claims, evaluate them, resolve disputes, and produce legally recognized documentation that a displaced person could actually use in a court or government institution.

No such system existed. And without one, the mandate of the Dayton Agreement could not be fulfilled.

My Role

I joined the CRPC as Director of Information Technology and ultimately served as Chief Information Officer. In that capacity I was responsible for the full scope of the organization’s technology operations: software design and development, networking, technical support, and data center operations, leading a team of 34 employees in total.

On the software side, I was directly involved in the architecture and design of the claims management application, and personally developed key components of it, including the certificate production module that generated the legal documents claimants needed to prove their property rights.

The Work

The Commission for Real Property Claims of Displaced Persons and Refugees (CRPC) needed software to manage the entire claims lifecycle, from initial intake through to final resolution and certificate production. Beyond that, although the CRPC had no direct enforcement power, it also required tools to monitor and report on whether its decisions were actually being implemented by local authorities throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina.

I led the design and oversaw the development of a desktop application that handled:

• Claims collection: Capturing property claim submissions from displaced persons and refugees across Bosnia and Herzegovina and the surrounding region
• Claim processing and resolution: Automating the evaluation and adjudication workflow so that CRPC staff could manage an unprecedented volume of cases
• Certificate production: Generating official certificates that claimants could present as legal proof of their property rights in courts and institutions throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina
• Implementation monitoring: Tracking and reporting on compliance with CRPC decisions by local authorities, providing the commission with visibility into whether its rulings were being carried out on the ground

The application was distributed to users across eight countries, reflecting the geographic spread of the Bosnian diaspora and the international staff involved in the commission’s work.

I also wrote the specifications for the CRPC’s public-facing website (crpc.org.ba), which was developed by members of my team and provided information about the commission’s mandate, the claims process, and progress updates for claimants and the international community following the commission’s work.

The Scale

By July 2003, the system had collected over 319,000 property claim applications, representing approximately one in four property-owning households in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The Outcome

The CRPC fulfilled its mandate under the Dayton Peace Agreement, processing claims and issuing certificates that gave displaced persons and refugees a legally recognized path to reclaiming their property rights. The commission’s work was recognized internationally as a critical component of post-conflict reconstruction and refugee return in the region.

The software was purpose-built for a finite mission. When that mission was complete, the system had done exactly what it was designed to do.

What This Project Represents

Most software projects measure success in user growth or revenue. This one measured success in families reconnected with their homes.

It also represents a kind of complexity that most developers never encounter: high-stakes data with real human consequences, a geographically distributed user base with no margin for error, and a mandate with international legal weight behind it. There was no “version 2.0” to fix mistakes. The work had to be right.

The CRPC website is preserved in the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20040607180159/http://www.crpc.org.ba/new/en/main.htm