Portuguese judge Ivo Rosa will succeed Theodor Meron in the appeal process against the former Republika Srpska (RS) entity President Radovan Karadzic, International Criminal Court deiced.

This marks the end of the of the legal dispute between judges Meron and Jean Claude Antonetti on the issue of who has the right to name the new judge.

The Appellate Chamber allowed Meron to chose his legal successor in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

The dispute was made after Karadzic’s defence requested Meron’s exemption from the Appellate Chamber on the grounds of bias, after which Meron decided to leave the Chamber and name judge Rosu as his successor.

Judge Antonetti and Karadzic’s defence then said that Antonetti should be the one to name Meron’s successor.

The Chamber decided that, even though he pulled from the Karadzic case, as President of the Court, Meron should have the right to name his successor in the Chamber.

Interestingly, Antonetti himself also appointed Judge Rosu for Meron's successor.

The dispute between the judges in the Karadzic case arose after Antonetti excluded the judges Meron, Carmelo Agius and Liu Daqun Liu Daqun from the Appellate Chamberduring the trial of the former Republika Srpska army general, Ratko Mladic, at the request of his defence.

Ratko Mladic, 76, received a life sentence in a first instance ruling at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia on November 22 last year. Apart from the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica, the former general was found guilty of a number of crimes against humanity committed between 1992 and 1995 – including the four-year-long siege of Sarajevo during which it’s citizens were terrorized with mortar and sniper fire, the ethnic cleansing of ethnic Bosniaks and Croats from Bosnian territory, as well taking UN soldiers hostage.