Former Bosnian Serb Leader Karadzic To Serve Remainder Of Life Sentence In British Prison
By RFE RL
(RFE/RL) — Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who is currently being held in a prison in The Hague for war crimes and genocide, will serve the remainder of his sentence in Britain.
Karadzic, 75, was sentenced to 40 years in prison in 2016 after being convicted of genocide for the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces.
In 2019, UN judges at The Hague extended the prison term to a life sentence.
“Radovan Karadzic is one of the few people to have been found guilty of genocide. He was responsible for the massacre of men, women, and children at the Srebrenica genocide and helped prosecute the siege of Sarajevo with its remorseless attacks on civilians,” Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab announced on May 12.
He also said Britain “should take pride” in the country’s support for the 30-year effort to bring the former Bosnian Serb political leader to justice.
Karadzic was also found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity for the almost four-year-long siege of Sarajevo by the Bosnian Serb forces and for overseeing a campaign of ethnic cleansing that drove Croats and Muslims out of Serb-claimed areas of Bosnia.
Karadzic and his military chief, General Ratko Mladic, were among the last suspects put on trial by the UN tribunal in The Hague for the civil war.
Karadzic was arrested in Belgrade on July 18, 2008, after spending more than a decade in hiding. He was handed over to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and after his conviction he was held at court’s detention center in The Hague.
On June 8, UN judges will rule on Mladic’s appeal against his genocide conviction.
Mladic was sentenced to life in prison in 2017 for the Srebrenica massacre and for war crimes and crimes against humanity in general during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.
