The Hague Tribunal upheld on appeal the convictions of the former Bosnian Serb military chief, General Ratko Mladic, for genocide and war crimes relating to the period during the 1992-1995 Bosnian War. The court upheld his life sentence for him, which means the 79-year-old will spend the rest of his life in prison. Mladic is nicknamed “the executioner of Srebrenica”. In the first instance in 2017 the judges had recognized his responsibility for both the Srebrenica massacre in which about 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed, both for the siege of Sarajevo in which about 10 thousand people died.
The final ruling was issued by a panel of five judges chaired by Prisca Matimba Nyambe, from Zambia. Di Mladic’s appeal was rejected “in its entirety”, the judge declared, confirming the life sentence. The panel also dismissed the appeal that had been lodged by prosecutors against the decision of the first instance judges to acquit Mladic of another charge of genocide, for the ethnic purges of the initial moments of the war to get non-Serbs out of different cities of Bosnia.