The International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals in The Hague has announced a decision rejecting the request for early release of war criminal Goran Jelisić.
Jelisić was arrested in 1998 and sentenced to 40 years in prison by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for crimes against humanity.
He was a soldier in the Army of Republika Srpska and was in charge of the Luka camp in Brčko, where he participated in inhumane treatment and systematic killing of detainees.
A year after his arrest, Jelisić pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity and violations of the customs of war. He was also charged with genocide, but the court dismissed that charge.
After serving two-thirds of his sentence, Jelisić requested early release, but the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals rejected it.
“Jelisić has shown good behavior in prison and has shown certain positive indicators in his rehabilitation process. However, after considering all the information before me, I believe that he has not yet reached a level of rehabilitation sufficient to merit early release. I encourage him to continue taking steps in his rehabilitation process, to consider concrete actions he could take to express his apology to the victims of his crimes, and to plan his reintegration into society more carefully,” said the president of this mechanism, Graciela Gatti Santana.
Incidentally, Jelisić also called himself the “Serbian Adolf Hitler”, and said that his “main motivation was the killing of Muslims.”
He is also known for the case from 1992, when Jelisić killed two civilians, Husein Krša and Hajrudin Muzurović, while Belgrade photographer Bojan Stojanović coldly recorded every moment.
According to available information, Stojanović knew what was going to happen and did not accidentally come across the camera. On the contrary, according to some sources, he paid Jelisić 500 German marks in advance to photograph the murder, as if it were a commissioned shot, not a document of the crime.
