Criminal homicide

Police are investigating if they had other accomplices

The president of the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague, Carmel Agius, told the UN Security Council on Monday evening that the final verdict in the Ratko Mladic trial will be delivered nine months after appeals hearings are finally held.

Former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic's defence lawyers have requested that appeals hearings scheduled for June 16 and 17 at the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague be postponed because of restrictions on cross-border movement imposed to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

The Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals announced on Monday that Ratko Mladic is recovering well from surgery and that defence and prosecution appeals against the verdict in his trial will be heard on June 16-17 in The Hague.

The appeals were originally set for March 17-18, but were postponed because the former Bosnian Serb military chief needed a colon operation.

In a ruling made public on Tuesday, Greece's Supreme Court upheld a decision by a Piraeus court giving a local man a 15-month suspended prison sentence for killing a neighbor's cat with an air gun and poisoning other cats in his neighborhood.

Miodrag Stojanovic, one of the lawyers representing Ratko Mladic at his trial in The Hague, told BIRN that the former Bosnian Serb military commander had a colon operation on Monday and has now left hospital.

"He was discharged from the hospital yesterday [Wednesday] and returned to the [UN] detention unit [in the Netherlands]," said Stojanovic.

Ratko Mladic's defence lawyers said on Monday that they have asked the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague to delay appeal hearings set for March 17 and 18 in order to check whether the former Bosnian Serb military commander is well enough to participate in the proceedings.

Decision taken by majority of judges

From the top of the UN military vehicle a UN UNPROFOR soldier scans the hillside with his binoculars looking for snipers and other military activity during the siege of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Hercegovina, 1994. Photo: EPA/FEHIM DEMIR

The appeals chamber of Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals has scheduled Ratko Mladic's appeal for March 17 next year, as the former Bosnian Serb military commander challenges the first-instance verdict sentencing him to life imprisonment.

The Cantonal Assembly unanimously adopted the declaration, filed by Democratic Action Party (SDA).
This declaration strongly condemns the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to "the Srebrenica genocide denier", as they put it.