The District Court in Columbia has again denied the motion of the wife of former Republika Srpska President Radovan Karadzic, who is serving a life sentence for genocide and war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina, after she complained that the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) wrongfully refused to remove her from the list of Specially Designated and Blocked Persons (SDN).
Considering the appeal of Ljiljana Karadzic, wife of Radovan Karadzic, which concerns allegations that the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the United States Department of the Treasury wrongfully denied her request to be removed from the list of Specially Designated and Blocked Persons (SDN), the District Court in Columbia has issued a decision to deny.
In her latest motion, she argued that OFAC’s decision was arbitrary, BIRN reports.
The Court’s decision stated that OFAC relied on Ljiljana Karadzic’s attendance at public events celebrating [her husband’s] crimes and legacy, including an event that challenged the legitimacy of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
“OFAC also relied on evidence, including statements by the prosecutor publicly defending Radovan or distorting the facts about the Bosnian war, her public criticism of the ICTY, including her public characterization of the ICTY as an ‘illegal’ and ‘malignant cancer’, and her refusal to cooperate with the ICTY’s efforts to capture Radovan, the Court’s decision states.
The Court also states that OFAC pointed to personal contacts and correspondence, including one in which she urged her husband never to surrender to the authorities.
Karadzic argues in his motion that OFAC’s sanctions against her are not justified because these events occurred “more than 20 years ago.”
“OFAC did not rely ‘solely on the prosecutor’s 20-year history of helping her husband evade arrest. It appropriately considered other past conduct, as well as more recent actions, in reaching its conclusion. Among the more recent actions is the prosecutor’s submission of false or misleading information regarding her contacts with Radovan while he was in hiding,” the decision states.
Her lawyer Peter Robinson tells Detektor that Karadzic has done nothing in the past 20 years to justify maintaining US sanctions, adding that the European Union lifted the same sanctions 14 years ago.
“I am very disappointed that the courts of the United States of America are unwilling to intervene and correct the abuses associated with US sanctions,” says Robinson.
The court states in its decision that anyone on the sanctions list can file a request for administrative review of OFAC’s decision, and that Karadzic, along with her children, was placed on the SDN list while her husband was on the run because they were suspected of helping him evade arrest.
Karadzic and her children filed a request with OFAC in 2020 to be removed from the SDN list. They filed a lawsuit in the District Court of Columbia in May 2023, claiming that OFAC had unreasonably delayed its decision on their removal request.
OFAC ultimately denied her request in October 2023, finding that she was “actively obstructing or posing a significant risk of actively obstructing” the Dayton Agreement or the Peace Implementation Conference conclusions.
Nevertheless, after her children dropped the lawsuit, Karadzic filed an amended complaint a month later, again challenging OFAC’s delay in deciding her request and its decision to deny her request.
Nearly a year later, the District Court of Columbia granted OFAC’s motion to dismiss the complaint and dismissed Karadzic’s motion as invalid, finding that the delay count of the complaint had become invalid at the time OFAC issued its decision.
Karadzic also filed a motion for mediation, which the Court denied in its decision.
Speaking of this request, which he says is unusual in the delisting process, attorney Robinson explains that he hoped that if he could convince President Donald Trump’s administration to begin negotiations, they could take a different approach to sanctions in the Balkans than the administration of former President Joe Biden.
In March 2019, the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (MIKT) sentenced Radovan Karadžić to life imprisonment for the genocide of Bosniaks from Srebrenica, the persecution of Bosniaks and Croats throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, the terrorization of the population of Sarajevo during the siege of the city, and the holding of UN peacekeepers hostage.
