The Appeals Chamber of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunal, a UN court for the war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, will hand down today the final verdict in the case of Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb wartime general who was initially sentenced to life in prison for war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war of 1990s.
According to N1 reporter from The Hague, more than 80 media teams have been accredited to follow the event, which is scheduled to start at 3 p.m. Also, the world media announced the verdict pronouncement on their front pages this morning.
The second and final verdict will be handed down by the Appeals Chamber Judges Prisca Matimba Nyambe, Aminatta Lois Runeni N’gum, Seymour Panton, Elizabeth Ibanda-Nahamya and newly appointed judge Mustapha El Baaj, the court announced.
The UN court, formerly called the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) sentenced Mladic on November 22, 2017, in a first-instance verdict to life imprisonment.
Mladic was a Bosnian Serb military leader during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina and trial judges found he was responsible for overseeing the murder of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica in 1995.
Trial judges found Mladic was responsible for ethnic cleansing campaigns against Bosnian Muslims and Croats, and murdering and terrorising civilians in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo during a 43-month siege, as part of a plan to forge a “Greater Serbia” out of parts of the former Yugoslavia.
Both the prosecution and defence filed appeals to the verdict.