U.N. court extends Karadzic sentence to life in prison for Bosnia war crimes
PARIS — A U.N. court Wednesday increased the sentence of Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader, from 40 years to life in prison for his role in the Bosnian war of the 1990s, reaffirming his conviction on charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Both the prosecution and the defense had appealed the 2016 result of Karadzic’s trial before the U.N. Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, in The Hague. Karadzic, who largely acted as his own lawyer in court, had asked to be acquitted of all charges.
The prosecution sought an increase in his sentence — a largely symbolic move, because Karadzic, 70 at the time of the verdict, was unlikely to live long enough to serve out his lengthy sentence. But symbolic or not, the court’s decision Wednesday to raise the penalty drew cheers and applause from Bosnians watching in the gallery.
The five-judge panel decided 3-2 that it was unreasonable for Karadzic to receive a 40-year sentence when some of his subordinates had been sentenced to life for their roles in the same atrocities, particularly the July 1995 massacre in and around the town of Srebrenica. The defendant watched calmly as the decision was delivered.
This offered a sharp contrast to the tense defendant who heard his first sentence in 2016. Then, Karadzic, acting as his own lawyer, argued he was a man of peace, driven solely by his desire to protect Serbs. He was so convinced of his innocence that he packed up his belongings, ready to return home.
In their appeal, prosecutors asked the court for an additional genocide verdict in the case, based on events in seven Bosnian towns where tens of thousands of people were killed. But the panel rejected that request, which had been the subject of intense debate among lawyers, human rights groups and victims.
During the war, which raged from 1992 to 1995, Karadzic was president of Republika Srpska, the region that tried to break away from Bosnia, where violence carried out by the dominant Serbs forced out much of the Croat and Muslim population.
The proceedings thoroughly investigated the bloodiest conflict in Europe since World War II, which tore apart Yugoslavia, ravaged several of the smaller nations that emerged from it and left more than 100,000 people dead.
The tribunal has tried many figures for crimes in the wars that broke up Yugoslavia. Karadzic and Gen. Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb commander, are the most senior figures to be convicted. Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian president whose extreme nationalism instigated and enabled the bloody conflict, died in 2006 in his cell in The Hague before the end of his trial.
The genocide charges against Karadzic dealt partly with the Srebrenica massacre, when 8,000 Bosnians, mostly men and boys, were rounded up and systematically killed.