War crimes

The Bosnian prosecution in its closing statement on Tuesday urged the state court in Sarajevo to convict Boris Bosnjak, Milos Mavrak, Miodrag Grubacic and Ilija Djajic of crimes against humanity.

The Bosnian state prosecution on Friday charged Milan Lukic, the wartime leader of the Avengers paramilitary group, with crimes against 20 passengers who were abducted from a train at Strpci station near Visegrad in eastern Bosnia in February 1993 and then murdered.

The appeals chamber of the Bosnian state court on Thursday quashed the first-instance verdict that sentenced Bosnian Serb ex-soldier Boro Milojica to eight years in prison for crimes against humanity in the Prijedor area and acquitted his fellow ex-serviceman Zelisav Rivic, and ordered a new trial.

The UN-backed Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals has announced that it has extended Jovica Stanisic's provisional release until April 30, 2020 because of his continuing illness.

It said that the extension was possible because "there is no indication that he has ever engaged in any practice undermining the administration of justice".

A Bosnian court on Oct. 30 sentenced a former Serb soldier to 20 years in prison for committing war crimes against Bosniak civilians during the 1992 Bosnian War.

A judge at the US District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri in the city of St. Louis on Tuesday gave former military policeman Adem Kostjerevac's lawyers a month to translate Bosnia and Herzegovina's extradition request and provide evidence that his alleged victim misidentified him.

The appeals chamber of the Bosnian state court ruled on Friday that sentences imposed on the two former Bosnian Serb policemen should be amalgamated, and that Zoran Babic should serve 35 years and Darko Mrdja 20 years.

The Bosnian state court found Sretko Pavic guilty on Monday of having participated in the murder of five civilians in the village of Rizvanovici in the Prijedor area in the second half of July 1992, and sentenced him to 13 years in prison.

Raphael Lemkin, the lawyer and scholar who coined the term "genocide" and initiated the Genocide Convention, was working on a multi-volume history of such massacres at the time he passed in 1959. He had planned five chapters on the Greeks - more than for any other people - in this unfinished work.

By George Gilson

Athens has called on Turkey to recognise the genocide of the Pontian Greek population by the forces of Kemal Ataturk three days after the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the genocide with mass m death Marches.