Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, convicted over the ‘Srebrenica massacre’ and other crimes, will be transferred to Britain to serve the rest of his life sentence for genocide, the UK Foreign Office has said.
“Karadzic is one of the few people to have been found guilty of genocide,” Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said in a statement on Wednesday. “He was responsible for the massacre of men, women and children at the Srebrenica genocide and helped prosecute the siege of Sarajevo with its remorseless attacks on civilians.”
In 2019, a UN tribunal increased Karadzic’s sentence to life, ruling that his initial 40-year jail term for some of Europe’s worst war crimes since World War II was too lenient.
He was convicted in 2016, and is currently held at a UN detention unit in the Netherlands.
Karadzic, who was president of the Republika Srpska territory and led the army of Bosnia during the civil war in the 1990s, was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including his troops’ killing of thousands of men and boys in Srebrenica in July 1995.
The then-UN high commissioner for human rights hailed Karadzic’s conviction as “hugely significant” and “symbolically powerful.”
Many Serbs have been critical of the UN courts’ rulings in relation to the conflict as vilifying their side and failing to bring to justice people from the opposing side who were accused of involvement in atrocities.
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