JURIST - Paper Chase: Bosnian Serb army commander transferred from ICTY to serve sentence in Norway

[JURIST] Vidoje Blagojevic [ICTY case backgrounder, PDF], former commander of the Bratunac Brigade of the Bosnian Serb Army, was transferred to Norway [press release] Friday to serve the remainder of his 15-year sentence for his role in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre [BBC timeline, JURIST news archive]. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 2005 sentenced [JURIST report] Blagojevic to 18 years in prison after convicting him of complicity in genocide, murder, and other crimes. The ICTY appeals chamber reduced Blagojevic's sentence to 15 years when it reversed [judgment summary; JURIST report] his conviction of complicity in genocide, holding that Blagojevic should have been acquitted on those charges because he was not aware that the massacre was going to take place. The court upheld his other convictions on aiding and abetting the persecutions, killings and forcible transfer of Bosnian Muslims.

The ICTY has determined that the 1995 killings of more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslims by government forces at Srebrenica constituted genocide. The two men believed to have masterminded the massacre, Ratko Mladic [ICTY case backgrounder; JURIST news archive] and former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic [ICTY case backgrounder], have yet to be captured. The UN News Service has more.

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