Date Set for Hague Tribunal's Final Trial
Arrested in July 2011, Goran Hadzic was the last suspect on Hague wanted list to be detained.
Date Set for Hague Tribunal's Final Trial
Arrested in July 2011, Goran Hadzic was the last suspect on Hague wanted list to be detained.
The trial of former Croatian Serb political leader Goran Hadzic will begin on October 16, judges confirmed during a status conference this week.
Hadzic was arrested in Serbia on July 20, 2011 after evading detention for seven years. He was the last remaining fugitive wanted by the Hague tribunal, and accordingly, his trial will be the court’s last.
A pretrial conference will be held on October 15, followed by the prosecution’s opening statements on October 16. Hadzic’s defence lawyers say they do not plan to give opening remarks until the defence case begins.
Presiding Judge Guy Delvoie asked whether Hadzic himself wanted to make a statement at the start of the trial, but his lawyers said they had not yet consulted with the accused on this issue.
During the war in Croatia in the early 1990s, Hadzic held senior political positions in the country’s Serb-held regions. He was president of the government of the self-declared Serbian Autonomous District of Slavonia, Baranja and Western Srem, known as SAO SBWS, and was president of the so-called Republic of the Serbian Krajina, RSK - which absorbed SAO SBWS territory - from February 1992 to December 1993.
Hadzic is charged with 14 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly committed against the Croat and non-Serb population, including persecutions, extermination, murder, imprisonment, torture, inhumane acts, cruel treatment, deportation, wanton destruction and plunder.
He is also alleged to have been part of a Joint Criminal Enterprise, JCE, with various other political and military officials, the purpose of which was the “permanent forcible removal of a majority of the Croat and other non-Serb population from approximately one-third of the territory of the Republic of Croatia” in order to create a Serb-dominated state.
Rachel Irwin is IWPR's Senior Reporter in The Hague.
