Appeals Judges Reject Karadzic Postponement
Former Bosnian Serb president had asked for more time to prepare his case.
Appeals Judges Reject Karadzic Postponement
Former Bosnian Serb president had asked for more time to prepare his case.
Appeals judges at the Hague tribunal this week rejected former Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic’s request to postpone his trial until June.
The same request was rejected by trial judges shortly before Karadzic delivered his opening statements on March 1, but judges allowed him to appeal against that decision and then suspended the commencement of witness testimony at his request.
“The trial chamber made no error in assessing that further postponement of the trial was not justified,” appeals judges wrote on March 31. “Karadzic has failed to demonstrate that the trial chamber abused its discretion in reaching that conclusion.”
The trial will now resume on April 13.
Karadzic – who continues to represent himself - originally asked for ten months of additional preparation time last autumn, when his trial date was set for October 26.
Both trial and appeals judges rejected that request, and Karadzic boycotted the start of his trial as a result.
A standby counsel, British barrister Richard Harvey, was then appointed to the case, but judges said he would only take over as Karadzic’s defence lawyer if the accused continued to obstruct the proceedings or failed to appear in court on March 1, when his trial was scheduled to resume.
Karadzic delivered his opening statements on March 1 and Harvey sat in the courtroom well apart from the accused and his legal advisers. Karadzic vehemently objected to Harvey’s appointment and the barrister’s role in the trial is yet to be determined.
In the most recent request to postpone the trial, originally filed on February 1, Karadzic argued that since his trial was halted in October, the prosecution had deluged him with about 300,000 pages of disclosure. He was unable to deal with this, he said, because the court registry had decreased funding for his legal advisory team.
The president of the tribunal, Judge Patrick Robinson, on February 19 ruled that the amount of funding available to Karadzic’s legal team should be increased.
Karadzic subsequently argued that the president’s decision was a further reason to postpone the trial, since he wanted to recover the time he had “lost” due to the funding dispute.
He said that the trial judges’ decision to proceed with the March 1 start date “exceeded its authority and invaded the province of the president”.
Appeals judges disagreed.
“The President solely dealt with the issue of remuneration for Karadzic’s defence team,” they wrote. “He refrained from stating how his determination of the issue might affect the scheduled date of the resumption of the trial.”
The appeals judges also concluded that “decisions relating to the general conduct of trial proceedings, including the scheduling of trials, are matters that fall within the discretion of Trial Chamber.”
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.
