The defense of the former commander of the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS), Ratko Mladic, requested the suspension of the proceedings before the Hague Tribunal because of “systemic bias” of this court.
Mladic’s lawyers requested the removal of judges Alphons Orie and Cristoph Flugge, and the appointment of new “unbiased” judges on their place.
The defense emphasized that Mladic’s rights have been violated because lawyers who worked on the verdict of Radovan Karadzic are now working on the preparation of the verdict to Mladic, and because two of the three judges from his council previously expressed their views on his guilt.
“The essence of this problem is that judges Orie and Flugge already condemned Mladic and brought significant conclusions about him. This jeopardizes their ability to be unbiased,” as stated from Mladic’s defense.
At the end, the defense appealed that the President of the Mechanism for International Tribunal, Theodor Meron, who will work appeals process, said that Mladic is guilty, and that senior officials of the UN repeated the same.
Especially emphasized was conclusion from the verdict regarding Srebrenica, where Mladic was labeled as a participant in a joint criminal enterprise that aimed to murder military age men, according to BIRN.
“It is clear that there is no presumption of innocence in the case of the defendant before this Tribunal. Besides the cancellation of the proceedings, the only possible solution would be to discontinue it permanently due to serious violations of human rights,” stated defense.
Mladic is trialed for genocide in Srebrenica, the persecution of Bosniaks and Croats throughout BiH, which reached the scale of genocide in several other municipalities, terrorizing the population of the citizens of Sarajevo and taking UN peacekeepers as hostages. For the same crimes, the Hague Tribunal sentenced Karadzic to 40 years in prison by the first instance verdict.
(Source: N. N./Klix.ba)
