Prosecutors urged judges at the UN court to reject former Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic’s appeal and increase his sentence to life imprisonment for genocide and other wartime crimes.
Prosecutors told the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals on the second day of appeals hearings in the Radovan Karadzic case on Tuesday that the former Bosnian Serb political leader’s sentence should be increased from 40 years to life.
Prosecutor Katrina Gustafson told the appeals judges that Karadzic had “abused his immense power to spill the blood of innocent civilians”.
“Justice requires that he receive the highest possible sentence, a life sentence,” she said.
Gustafson argued that Karadzic had threatened non-Serbs in Bosnia with “extinction and annihilation”.
“He set the stage for a criminal campaign of a genocidal nature,” she said.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia found Karadzic guilty in March 2016 of genocide in Srebrenica, the persecution of Bosniaks and Croats throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, terrorising the population of Sarajevo and taking UN peacekeepers hostage.
At the first day of the appeals hearings on Monday, Karadzic argued that his conviction should be overturned because his trial was unjust.
But the prosecutors said that his appeal should be rejected in its entirety.
The prosecution is also asking for him to him to be further convicted of genocide in seven more Bosnian municipalities in 1992.
Prosecutor Laurel Baig told the court that it had been proved that Serb forces under Karadzic’s supreme command committed “the largest mass murder since World War Two” – the killings of thousands of Bosniaks from Srebrenica in July 1995.
Baig quoted the verdict, which said the Bosnian Serb Army and police shot “at least 5,115” Bosniaks after the fall of Srebrenica.
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