Prosecutors on Wednesday called on UN judges to uphold former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic's life sentence for war crimes, including genocide, while his lawyers are calling for an acquittal or a retrial, Reuters reported.
“Srebrenica was Mladic's operation, and the trial chamber was right to conclude that he was criminally responsible for these crimes,” prosecutor Laurel Baig was quoted by Reuters as saying said on the second and final day of appeal hearings.
Mladic, 77, was the Bosnian Serb military leader during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina and trial judges found he was responsible for overseeing the murder of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica in 1995.
Trial judges found Mladic was responsible for ethnic cleansing campaigns against Bosnian Muslims and Croats, and murdering and terrorising civilians in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo during a 43-month siege, as part of a plan to forge a “Greater Serbia” out of parts of the former Yugoslavia.
Related news
Mladic will have the opportunity to speak for 10 minutes at the end of Wednesday's hearing.
Appeals judges have yet to set a date for a decision, likely to be in 2021.
On Tuesday, international judges began this two-day appeal hearing in the case against Mladic. The appeal hearing before the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT) in The Hague has been adjourned on several occasions as the 78-year-old underwent a surgical procedure and most recently due to the coronavirus pandemic.
