UN Court to Deliver Its Final Verdict in Serbian Officials’ Trial

The UN court in The Hague is delivering its final verdict on Wednesday in the war crimes retrial of top Serbian State Security officials Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic, who have appealed against their 12-year sentences for involvement in wartime crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Stanisic, the former chief of the State Security Service of Serbia, and Simatovic, the former commander of the Special Operations Unit, were convicted in June 2021 after a retrial.

The two men, both powerful and widely-feared figures in Slobodan Milosevic's regime in Serbia in the 1990s, were found to have aided fighters from the Special Operations Unit, an armed police force known as the Red Berets, who committed the crimes.

Before this, no Serbian state official had been convicted by the UN's Yugoslav war crimes tribunal for their involvement in the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The trial of Stanisic and Simatovic is the final one in which the judges of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, as the successor to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, will hand down a verdict.

The two defendants were charged with participating in a joint criminal enterprise led by the then president of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic, from April 1991 to December 1995. Its alleged objective was to remove the majority of Bosniaks and Croats from parts of the territories of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia. Milosevic died before the end of his own trial in The Hague.

The court established that numerous crimes were committed by Serbian forces in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1991 and 1995.

But Stanisic and Simatovic were only were found guilty of aiding and abetting murder, deportation, forced...