Former head of the Crisis Staff of the Serbian Autonomous Oblast (SAO) Krajina and convicted war criminal Radoslav Brđanin, who was sentenced to 30 years in prison by the Hague Tribunal, was released for health reasons.
Brdjanin will soon land at the Banja Luka Airport after 23 years spent in prison.
He served his sentence in Denmark
On several occasions, the president of the court, Carmel Agius, refused his requests for early release.
After the verdict of the Hague Tribunal, Brđanin served his sentence in Denmark, from where he was transferred to the custody of the Hague Mechanism for International Criminal Courts from prison in Denmark on September 14 last year.
The reason for his transfer was that Denmark informed the court in The Hague that according to all their laws the Brđanin had fulfilled the conditions to be released and that they no longer had the right to keep him in prison. Then they said that he could no longer serve his sentence in Denmark because that would violate his human rights.
Committed war crimes in Krajina
He was supposed to remain in Scheveningen until the Hague Criminal Courts Mechanism made an agreement with another country to which he would be transferred to serve the remainder of his sentence or to be released.
Brđanin became a member of the SDS after the introduction of the multi-party political system. In 1991, he was elected as the vice-president of the Assembly of Communities of SAO Krajina, and in the same year he was elected as a member of the NSRS.
After the war, Brđanin was the president of the People’s Party of RS until he was arrested in July 1999 and taken to The Hague on charges of being responsible for war crimes in Krajina.