Karadzic Postponement Opposed

Hague prosecutors this week asked judges to deny the request by former Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic to postpone the resumption of his trial once again.



Prosecutors delivered a written motion on February 3 arguing that trial and appeals judges have already determined that Karadzic was ready for trial, and that the judges’ previous decision to postpone it until March 1 was “unrelated to any need for Karadzic to further prepare”.



Karadzic, who continues to represent himself, refused to attend the start of his trial on October 26 – and the prosecutor’s subsequent opening statements – claiming he needed an extra ten months to prepare his case. That request had previously been rejected by both trial and appeals judges.



The judges’ November 5 solution was to appoint a standby counsel who will take over the case if Karadzic fails to appear in court on March 1 or if he “obstructs the proper and expeditious conduct” of the proceedings.



Prosecutors argued this week that this previous postponement was granted so that the stand-by counsel would have time to prepare for trial “should Karadzic choose again to absent himself from the proceedings”.



Karadzic informed judges in writing on February 1 that he would not be ready in March because of a November decision by the tribunal registry, which decreased funding for his team of legal advisers.



He stated that six members of his team were no longer being compensated by the court and had not been able to return to work full-time. Furthermore, he wrote that since November 10, he has had no investigators or case managers “to assist him with trial preparation”.



Karadzic appealed against the registry decision, but stated that even if the funding was put back in place, the trial should be postponed anyway so that he “can be restored to the position he would be in but for the Registrar’s error”.



If funding is not restored, Karadzic said that he was “simply unlikely to participate in a trial in which he must face the prosecution and all of its resources with one team member and no case managers and investigators. Such a trial would be a farce”.



Karadzic also appealed against the decision to appoint British barrister Richard Harvey as standby counsel, arguing that the registrar “violated his right to choose his standby counsel and imposed a counsel who Dr Karadzic cannot trust”.



That appeal is pending, but Karadzic said that if Harvey was removed from the case, the trial would need to be postponed by at least three and a half months to give the new standby counsel time to prepare.



However, the prosecution contended that the outcome of the Harvey appeal “has no bearing on whether Karadzic himself is ready for trial” and it was thus “misleading” to state that the trial would have to be postponed if Harvey was removed from the case.



The prosecution also took issue with Karadzic’s claim that he had been burdened with an additional 300,000 pages of disclosure and has no case managers to “review, process and organise” these documents.



“Karadzic fails to point out that the vast majority of this disclosure is in response to his own specific search requests,” prosecutors wrote.



They also point out that the material was only “remotely relevant” to the prosecution case or may relate to Karadzic’s own defence case.



“A full review of this material by Karadzic is not necessary before the resumption of trial,” prosecutors continued.



While Karadzic encouraged judges to wait until all of the appeals were decided before taking a decision on the trial date, prosecutors disagreed with that course of action.



“To avoid needlessly inconveniencing witnesses, and to avoid the costly exercise of bringing witnesses to The Hague unnecessarily, any decision on postponement should be made as soon as possible,” they stated.



Karadzic, the president of Bosnia’s Republika Srpska from 1992 to 1996, is accused of planning and overseeing the siege of Sarajevo that left nearly 12,000 people dead, as well as the massacre of almost 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica in July 1995.



The indictment – which lists 11 counts in total – alleges that he 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”.



Rachel Irwin is an IWPR reporter in The Hague.