Ratko Mladic was sentenced to life in prison and he has only one life, said attorney Anto Nobilo commenting on the final ruling in the trial of the Bosnian Serb wartime military leader before the UN court that was handed down on Tuesday.

According to him, the ruling was based on the same principle as the ruling in the case of Bosnian Serb politician Radovan Karadzic, who was also sentenced to life imprisonment for various crimes including the ethnic cleansing, the Srebrenica genocide, and taking the UN troops hostages during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.

“If you read the verdict carefully then it is completely clear those were the same facts, the same evidence, and even Mladic is mentioned in the context of certain crimes, so it was clear that Mladic's verdict will be identical to that of Karadzic,” said the legal expert, speaking in N1's Pressing on Wednesday evening.

He explained this is a regular practice.

“It was about the same actions. Karadzic could not have committed the crime of genocide if there was no Mladic,” he added.

Asked to comment on the fact that Mladic was acquitted of genocide charges for other six Bosnian municipalities, Nobilo said that proving a genocide is a sensitive matter and it is necessary to prove a crime is aimed at rooting out an ethnic group.

“The court chamber decided here – it will sound bad – that the amount of the Bosniak victims was not sufficient in other municipalities. But, one needs to be practical here – Mladic got a life sentence and he has only one life,” he stressed.

As for the responsibility, Nobilo noted that this was the individual one and cannot be put on an entire people.

“It is always individual responsibility, even if there were 5,000 individuals. We must be careful not to blame the whole people,” he explained.

Dissenting opinion of judge Prisca Matimba Nyambe on all counts of the indictment that were upheld by other judges, should not worry anyone, said Nobilo, but he wonders what was her logic.

“I wonder how the murder of 8,000 men and boys at a certain spot is not a genocide,” he asked, referring to the Srebrenica genocide, one of the charges that Mladic was sentenced for.

The Hague-based UN court confirmed on Tuesday the first-instance ruling for Ratko Mladic, sentencing him to life in prison for the Srebrenica genocide and other war crimes and crimes against humanity during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.