Ratko Mladić

The Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals has decided to discontinue a pilot project that enabled the Hague war crimes court's detainees to make and receive video calls via the internet, saying there were security concerns.

The chief prosecutor at the UN-backed Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals, Serge Brammertz, told the UN Security Council in New York on Wednesday that comments by two Serbian politicians on last week's 24th anniversary of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide were intolerable.

Darko Mladic said that he talked to his father from detention unit and that he is feeling well now.
Mladic got sick during his wife's visit on Wednesday, while she also visited him in the hospital on Thursday.

Several events were held in Belgrade on Wednesday and Thursday to commemorate the anniversary of the 1995 massacres of thousands of Bosniaks from Srebrenica by Bosnian Serb forces.

"The challenges in investigating and prosecuting genocide were immense," Alan Tieger, who was in charge of the case against Radovan Karadzic at the UN court in The Hague, told BIRN ahead of the 24th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacres on Thursday.

The registrar's office at Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals has said that it will listen in on Radovan Karadzic's telephone calls for several days after he addressed a public debate in Montenegro by phone from the UN Detention Unit in the Netherlands.

The Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals has so far not taken any action to sanction Radovan Karadzic after he addressed a public discussion in Montenegro over the telephone from the UN Detention Unit in the Netherlands, his lawyer Peter Robinson told BIRN on Monday.

Radovan Karadzic in court in April 2016. Photo: EPA/ROBIN VAN LONKHUIJSEN/POOL.

Former Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic has submitted an appeal against the decision not to allow him to appeal his second-instance verdict, sentencing him to life in prison for genocide in Srebrenica, among other crimes.

Vasvija Vidovic, a lawyer who has represented former Bosnian Army soldiers at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the Bosnian state court, argued that defendants find themselves difficult financial situations because trials are long-running and very expensive.

An official state ceremony led by President Aleksandar Vucic was held in the southern Serbian city of Nis on Sunday evening, while at the same time nationalists protested in Belgrade on the anniversary of the start of the NATO military campaign on March 24.

Vucic told about 2,000 Serbians who attended the ceremony in Nis that the NATO bombing was a crime.