A court in Belgrade has convicted the parents of the boy who carried out the massacre at the "Vladislav Ribnikar" primary school in May 2023. The father, Vladimir Kecmanovic, received 14 years and six months in prison, and the mother, Miljana, two years and 11 months. It is a rare ruling that deserves attention: the court decided that those who were supposed to prevent what the child did bear responsibility too.

The details the court laid out draw a picture of a chain of failures that led to what could have been prevented. The boy planned the attack weeks in advance. The night before, in the flat itself, two pistols were taken from a locked cabinet - a cabinet that, evidently, wasn't hard enough to reach. When a surveillance camera recorded it, the father was at that very moment watching the footage through an app. The security system existed; the man behind it did not react.

That is precisely the point of the verdict. It isn't about shifting the blame from the child to someone else, but about the question every society must put to itself after a tragedy like this: who had access to the weapons, who looked but didn't see, who could have stopped it and didn't. A weapon in a home with a child showing signs of crisis is not a private matter - it is a responsibility the law now recognizes.

For the region, this is an important precedent. Too often, after cases like this, the conversation ends with "the child was ill" and stops there, as if there were no adults around him. The Belgrade court said something else - that responsibility doesn't vanish because the perpetrator was a minor. The question that remains for all of us in the Balkans is whether a lesson like this will be learned before the next tragedy, or only after it.