The United Nations' international Court rejected the request from the war-time president of Bosnia's Republika Srpska (RS) entity Radovan Karadzic to disqualify two judges from making further decisions in his case on the account of bias, the Court announced Tuesday.

The President of the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals as the Hague-based Court is called, Carmel Agius, said in his decision that Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader convicted of genocide and other wartime crimes “failed to demonstrate a clear error of reasoning in the Impugned Decision,” from October 2019, and therefore, “the reconsideration of the Impugned Decision is not warranted.”

The Court sentenced Radovan Karadzic to a life sentence in March 2019, for his involvement in the genocide of Srebrenica Bosniaks in 1995, as well as the persecution of Bosniaks and Croats across Bosnia and for the terrorising of Sarajevo residents during the siege of the city.

The Court also sentenced him for the taking of UN peacekeepers as hostages during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia which left the country subdivided into two semi-autonomous entities – the Bosniak-Croat Federation (FBiH) entity and the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska (RS), and a weak central government.

After the sentencing, the former RS president sought to review the verdict and change it to 40 years behind bars. The decision was denied by Judge Agius, one of the judges Karadzic says is biased.

After this, Karadzic appealed once more asking that the decision be made by judge Jean-Claude Antonetti, instead of either Agius or Theodore Merone, the former Court President.

Karadzic claimed that Meron and Agius made previous convictions for similar charges in other cases, making them biased against him.
The Court rejected this claim and this axed his attempt to review his verdict.