The final verdict in the case against former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who appealed against the first-instance verdict, will be rendered in December 2018, the UN International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMICT) said Wednesday following the final status conference in this case.

Karadzic was sentenced on March 24, 2016 to 40 years in prison for genocide and crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Karadzic asked in the appeal for annulment of the first-instance verdict and a repeated trial due to, as he said, procedural errors and inaccurately determined facts. The prosecutors, on the other hand, demanded that Karadzic is also convicted of genocide in seven other municipalities except for Srebrenica and for a life sentence.

During the Wednesday’s status conference, Karadzic thanked for being allowed to communicate with his family through Skype.

The IRMICT is a successor body of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) that had been established in 1993 to prosecute serious crimes committed during the Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s.