UN war crimes judges on Thursday threw out an appeal by two former top Bosnian Serb officials against their conviction, upholding a 22-year jail term imposed for their roles in "ethnic cleansing" during the 1990s conflict. Mico Stanisic and Stojan Zupljanin had appealed against the 2013 sentence after they were convicted of leading a campaign to rid Bosnia of Muslims, Croats and other non-Serbs during the 1992-1995 conflict.
The two men were close associates of one-time Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who was found guilty in March on charges of genocide and war crimes for his role in the fighting that killed more than 100,000 people and left 2.2 million others homeless. The appeals chamber at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia dismissed in their "entirety" the appeals brought by Stanisic and Zupljanin, upheld the convictions, and "affirms the sentences of 22 years of imprisonment," judge Carmel Agius said. Stephane Bourgon, lawyer for Stanisic, told AFP he was "stunned" and "disillusioned" by the ruling.
"We believed we had very good grounds of appeal," he said. Stanisic, 62, a former Bosnian Serb interior minister, and ex-regional security services chief Zupljanin, 64, were convicted of 10 charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity including murder and torture. They were also accused of the cruel treatment of non-Serbs in municipalities and detention centres during the war triggered by the break-up of the former Yugoslavia after the fall of communism.
The prosecution had also appealed the sentence as too light "for the seriousness of the crimes." But while the appeals chamber partly found the prosecution's appeal justified, it refused to impose new sentences. Based in The Hague, the ICTY in March 2013 convicted the two men of taking part in a joint criminal enterprise to remove non-Serbs from Bosnia's municipalities marked to become part of the Serbian state. They allowed forces under their command to engage in the "violent takeover of those municipalities and the ensuing widespread and systematic campaign of terror and violence."
The crimes were committed between April and December 1992 in 20 of Bosnia's municipalities and 50 different detention facilities set up by Bosnian Serb forces where captives were beaten, tortured, mutilated, sexually assaulted, humiliated and physically abused. Defence claims that the trial judges had erred in their original judgement almost all thrown out by the appeals chamber. The defence had also sought to appeal as Stanisic's lawyer Bourgon accused the judges of bias during the three-and-a-half year trial. Bourgon based his argument on a bombshell letter written by Danish former ICTY judge Frederik Harhoff in mid-2013 in which the judge harshly criticised a sudden raft of acquittals before the court.