War crimes

Appeals against Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic's 40-year prison sentence will be heard before judges at a UN tribunal at The Hague in April.

The president of the UN war crimes tribunal, Theodor Meron, said on February 27 that the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals will hear "the appeals in the case" on April 23 and 24.

The UN war crimes tribunal said Belgrade must declare its willingness to take over the case against two Serbian Radical Party members who are wanted for interfering with witnesses at their leader’s trial.

The prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC) launched initial probes on Feb. 7 into alleged crimes against humanity during the “war on drugs” in the Philippines and political upheaval in Venezuela.

Voice of America reported this on Thursday.

The nomination was submitted by US Congress Helsinki Commission Chairman Senator Roger Wicker and Representative Eliot Engel, ranking member of the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

An inquiry by the Hague-based war crimes tribunal said it could not have stopped Bosnian Croat war criminal Slobodan Praljak from killing himself by taking poison in the courtroom.

At its closing event, UN Secretary-General Antonio Gutteres said the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia had shown the international community’s commitment to holding war criminals accountable.

The national strategy has not addressed the problems of unreasonably long war crimes trials and the small number of new indictments issued, says a report by the Humanitarian Law Centre.

More than a decade after Serbia started to prosecute war crimes, the country is to adopt its first-ever strategy to comprehensively deal with offences committed during the 1990s conflicts.

The chances of anyone being prosecuted for Syrian war crimes are today smaller than ever, experts say, as realpolitik smothers an increasingly solid mountain of evidence accumulated during the often barbaric four-year conflict.

The International Criminal Court on Jan. 5 said Palestinian authorities had formally recognised the court's jurisdiction to investigate crimes allegedly committed during last summer's Gaza war.