PARIS — The highest court of the United Nations ruled on Tuesday that neither Croatia nor Serbia committed genocide against each other’s peoples when they waged war during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.

The two separate rulings were the result of civil lawsuits that both countries had filed at the court, the International Court of Justice at The Hague. Each claimed the other had violated the Genocide Convention. Croatia, moreover, demanded extensive reparations for war damages.

Peter Tomka, the presiding judge from Slovakia who read out the verdicts, spoke of the killings of civilians and the widespread destruction committed by the forces from both sides. But he said the large-scale operations to displace people in the two countries did not meet the criteria for genocide.

“Genocide requires the intent to destroy a group,” he said, “not to inflict damage on it or to remove the population.”