Two trials, with hatred in the dock

• Last Updated: October 27. 2009 10:27PM UAE / October 27. 2009 6:27PM GMT

Two important criminal trials began this week, both connected to the killing of Muslims. In The Hague, Radovan Karadzic, the former Serbian president, faces charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity connected to his involvement in the Bosnian war, especially with regard to the slaughter in Srebrenica. In Dresden, a German man stands trial for the killing of the pregnant Marwa al Sherbini, the so-called “veil martyr”. The course and outcome of both trials will be closely monitored, but, perhaps counter-intuitively, the verdict in the latter will have the greater impact.

It is difficult to understate the heinous nature of Mr Karadzic’s crimes. He has the blood of thousands of men, women and children on his conscience. It is for men such as Mr Karadzic that international criminal courts were conceived. But while his conviction and imprisonment would surely bring some sense of closure to the bereaved survivors, it can make amends only for the victims of Europe’s recent bloody past.

The death of Mrs Sherbini has far greater implications for the future of Europe. The sequence of events leading up to her death began with a situation all too familiar to the continent’s Muslim community. Mrs Sherbini was attacked for wearing the hijab and called a “terrorist”. She sued her attacker and won. At an appeal hearing on the civil judgment, the defendant attacked her with a knife, stabbing her 18 times in the middle of the courtroom, killing her and her unborn child. Her husband, who leapt to her rescue, not only suffered stab wounds himself but was shot by a police officer who mistook him for the assailant. The entire fiasco has inflamed the debate over the perceived docility of European governments in the face of growing Islamophobia.

The death of the Qatari teenager Mohammed al Majid at the hands of racist British thugs; the rise of parties such as the BNP; the attempted denial of citizenship to a French woman for no other reason than that she wore the niqab: all of these point to a worrying trend in Europe, a supposed bastion of a progressive and tolerant ideology. Mr Karadzic should represent the past, when Europe sat complacent while thousands were killed for their beliefs. The trial of Mrs Sherbini’s killer should be a statement that religious tolerance is truly an essential part of being European.