"The Supreme Court upholds the opinion of the (lower) court that the U.N. has the most far-reaching form of immunity and cannot be prosecuted by any national court," a summary of the ruling said.
The final ruling was the last legal option in the Netherlands for a group of survivors of the July 1995 massacre, when as many as 8,000 boys and men were killed by Serb forces in an area that the United Nations had declared a "safe haven", Reuters said.
Lawyers representing a group of 6,000 survivors calling themselves the Mothers of Srebrenica said they would appeal against the decision at the European Court of Human Rights.
"The U.N., as the international human rights champion, should not stand above the law but should take responsibility for its role in the Srebrenica genocide in 1995," a statement issued by the group said. "This is a violation of fundamental human rights and in contravention of the case law of the European Court for Human Rights (ECHR) and the European Court of Justice (ECJ)."
Radislav Krstic, commander of the Bosnian Serb Drina Corps, was the first accused to have been found guilty of aiding and abetting genocide. The UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague found that the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995 was an act of genocide, sentencing Krstic in 2004 to 35 years' imprisonment for his role in it.
The fall of Srebrenica to Serb forces was the worst single atrocity during the 1992-95 war and the first act of genocide in Europe since the Nazi Holocaust against Jews, the news agency said.
Axel Hagedorn, an attorney at the Van Diepen Van der Kroef law firm representing families of the victims, said an appeal would be filed at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasburg within six months. "We will argue that the Dutch soldiers and the United Nations violated human rights," he was quoted by Reuters as saying. "Granting legal immunity to a group claiming to defend human rights is like turning things upside down."
Reuters said that inexperienced and outgunned Dutch soldiers were unable to prevent attacking Serb fighters from capturing Srebrenica, separating Bosnian Muslim men from women and busing them off to dozens of execution sites.
The Srebrenica massacre has been the subject of debate in the Netherlands for many years. In 1996, the government asked the Dutch Institute for War Documentation (NIOD) to research what had happened before, during and after the fall of Srebrenica. Its report, published in 2002, says that the mission of the UN Dutch Battalion was ill-conceived and practically impossible. The Dutch government partly accepted responsibility and the second Cabinet of Prime Minister Wim Kok resigned in 2002.
Last year, a Dutch appeals court found the Dutch state responsible for the deaths of three victims, opening the way for compensation claims over the failed peacekeeping mission.