The court rightfully convicted Radovan Karadzic of genocide and other war crimes because the charges against him were sufficiently proven, prosecutor Laurel Baig said during the appeals hearing at the ICTY successor, the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals.

Karadzic was sentenced to 40 years in prison by the now-closed International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Under the orders of Karadzic, the former President of wartime Republika Srpska (RS), now a Serb-dominated semi-autonomous entity within Bosnia, the now-defunct RS Army had committed the “largest mass murder since the Second World War,” Baig said, referring to the July 1995 Srebrenica genocide.

The ruling stated that the RS Army and police force were responsible for the murder of “at least 5.115” Muslims after the fall of Srebrenica.

“Karadzic knew of that plan, he joined in on it and actively participated in its implementation,” Baig said.

Karadzic’s defence claimed the Court based its decision on a wrong interpretation of a “coded” phone conversation between him and one of his subordinates during the massacre. The subordinate informed him that there were about 2,000 Muslim prisoners already in Bratunac and that more are expected. Karadzic told him that “all goods must be placed inside warehouses before noon tomorrow… not in the warehouses over there, but elsewhere”.

The Court interpreted “the goods” being Srebrenica’s Bosniaks who were rounded up and then systematically executed. The defence claimed that Karadzic meant the prisoners should be sent to the Batkovic camp but Baig disputed this claim, saying none of the prisoners arrived in Batkovic after that conversation and that this conversation represents “the moment Karadzic got actively involved in the Srebrenica genocide.”

Karadzic was convicted of various crimes against humanity, including the ethnic cleansing of Bosniaks and Croats and the bloody siege of Sarajevo.

His defence team said Monday that the initial trial was unfair and called for a re-trial. Karadzic also personally addressed the Court, describing the crimes he was convicted of as a “myth”.

“That permanent expulsion things is a myth. I signed agreements on the return of refugees… There is no way that what the indictment says is right,” he said on Monday, adding that his conviction came based on “wrongly determined facts” and claiming there were procedural irregularities during his trial.

He also distanced himself from the volunteer and para-military forces which committed some of the war crimes he was sentenced for.

“We arrested and tried them,” Karadzic said.

Prosecutors had asked for the Karadzic’s appeal to be rejected in full and his sentence to be converted into life in prison.