prijava
New York/The Hague, December 12 (FENA) - The President of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (Mechanism), Judge Carmel Agius, presented the Mechanism’s fifteenth progress report to the United Nations Security Council (Council) on Wednesday, outlining its judicial work and other key activities during the past six months.
Turning to judicial activity in The Hague, President Agius reported that judgements in the Stanišić and Simatović retrial and the Mladić appeal remain on track to be delivered by the end of 2020.
A final verdict to Ratko Mladić will be handed down before The Hague tribunal by the end of 2020, Carmel Agius, president of The Hague Judicial Mechanism, announced in a regular semi-annual report to the UN Security Council in New York.
The Hague Tribunal sentenced Mladić, a former Bosnian Serb military chief, to life imprisonment finding him guilty of genocide in Srebrenica, persecution of Bosniaks and Croats throughout BiH, terrorizing the population in Sarajevo and taking UN peacekeepers hostage in the period 1991-1995. Mladic's defense filed the appeal.
Mladić was acquitted of genocide charges in six other Bosnian municipalities in the first instance verdict.
Hearing on the appeals is expected to take place before The Hague Appellate Panel early next spring.
The President of the Mechanism, Agius, also announced in New York that the retrial proceedings of Jovica Stanišić and Franko Simatović, alias Frenki, will end with a first-instance verdict by the end of next year.
Defendants and prosecutors will have the right to appeal the judgment.
Jovica Stanišić (69) former chief of the Serbian State Security Service, SDB, and Franko Simatović (69), an intelligence officer with the same service, are charged with the persecution, murder, deportation and forcible resettlement of Croat and Muslim civilians in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina during the wars of the 1990s.
The appeals chamber ruled that there were serious legal and factual errors when Stanišić and Simatović were initially acquitted of war crimes in 2013, and ordered the case to be retried and all the evidence and witnesses reheard in full by new judges.
The retrial began in the summer of 2017, with evidence being presented by the defense of the second indictee Simatović.
Chief Prosecutor of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, Serge Brammertz, reiterated his conviction before the UN Security Council of denying war crimes and glorification of convicted war criminals across the former Yugoslavia.
Brammertz stressed that politicians in the region "do not win theier votes by promising reconciliation or building bridges to other communities."
(FENA) A. B.
