Karadzic Requests Further Trial Suspension
Defendant wants trial delayed for another six weeks to give him time to review new material.
Karadzic Requests Further Trial Suspension
Defendant wants trial delayed for another six weeks to give him time to review new material.
Radovan Karadzic requested another trial suspension this week at the Hague tribunal to review material recently disclosed to him by the prosecution.
Karadzic, who represents himself, had already requested a three month trial suspension for similar reasons at the end of January. In response, judges decided to grant him six weeks – from March 21 until May 5 – and chided the prosecution for their “pattern” of disclosure violations.
This week, Karadzic stated that he had received yet another installment of material from the prosecution at the end of February, including some 20,000 pages and 38 videos. Most of the disclosed items are exculpatory – or potentially exonerating – and Karadzic claimed he could not prepare for witness cross-examination, or develop a “coherent defence strategy” until he was able to review all of it properly.
He asked for a six week suspension – tacked on to the six weeks already granted – so that he would not be required to “continue defending events in the [Bosnian] municipalities until he has reviewed all of the disclosure that he was entitled to receive before the trial commenced”.
Prior to this latest hiatus, the judges had granted Karadzic’s requests for a trial suspension on three occasions—for a month last November, one week last September and two weeks last August. Each of those times, Karadzic had just received a trove of material from the prosecution.
While witness testimony commenced in April 2010, the prosecution only recently finished the first component of its case – the sniping and shelling of Sarajevo – and is now moving on to crimes carried out in various Bosnian municipalities. After that, the prosecution will hear witnesses regarding the 1995 Srebrenica massacre.
Prosecutors allege that Karadzic, the president of Bosnia's self-declared Republika Srpska from 1992 to 1996, is responsible for crimes of genocide, persecution, extermination, murder and forcible transfer which “contributed to achieving the objective of the permanent removal of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats from Bosnian Serb-claimed territory”.
He is also accused of planning and overseeing the 44-month siege of Sarajevo that left nearly 12,000 people dead, as well as the massacre of some 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica in July 1995. Karadzic was arrested in Belgrade in July 2008 after 13 years on the run.
Rachel Irwin is an IWPR reporter in The Hague.
