The International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (MICT) will next week deliver the final verdict in a case against Bosnian Serb wartime commander Ratko Mladic, who was given a life sentence in the first-instance trial in November 2017.

The verdict with which the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the MICT as its legal successor bring to an end their last case related to the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, will be delivered by a trial chamber chaired by Judge Prisca Matimba Nyambe. The other members of the trial chamber are Aminatta Lois Runeni N’gums, Seymour Panton, Elizabeth Ibanda-Nahamya and Mustapha El Baaj.

Mladic, whom foreign media have named the “Butcher of Bosnia”, reporting about his responsibility for the worst atrocities on European soil after World War II, was found guilty of genocide in Srebrenica, crimes against humanity and breaches of laws and customs of war.

After the trial, which lasted more than five years and during which testimonies of as many as 592 witnesses for the prosecution and defence were heard, the trial chamber dismissed the part of the indictment that charged Mladic with genocide in the municipalities in which forces under his command in 1992 carried out mass-scale campaigns of ethnic persecution and killed or expelled the largest part of local Croat and Bosniak population.

The ICTY trial chamber concluded that Mladic had committed the crimes he was convicted for by participating in four joint criminal enterprises. The first involved a comprehensive plan aimed at permanently removing Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) and Croats from areas of Bosnia and Herzegovina to which Bosnian Serbs laid claim, the second was designed to spread terror among civilians with a campaign of sniping and shelling, the third was aimed at eliminating Bosnian Muslims from Srebrenica, and the fourth at taking UN peacekeepers hostage in order to prevent NATO to carry out airstrikes on Bosnian Serb military targets.

Both the prosecution and the defence appealed against the first-instance verdict.