Mico Stanisic i Stojan Zupljanin in the courtroom

The aftershocks of the Harhoff affair are still felt at the Tribunal six months after the disqualification of the Danish judge at the request of Vojislav Seselj, who argued Harhoff was biased in favor of the conviction of the accused, as evidenced by a letter leaked to the Danish press.

On Monday, the Tribunal's vice-president Carmel Agius appointed a three-judge panel which will consider the repeated motion filed by Stojan Zupljanin and Mico Stanisic for the disqualification of Chinese judge Liu Daqun from the Appeals Chamber which is set to rule on the defense motion to quash the conviction and to release the accused.

Former Bosnian Serb police leaders Stojan Zupljanin and Mico Stanisic were sentenced to 22 years in prison each for the crimes committed in 1992. Last October, they filed a motion to the Appeals Chamber, asking the appellate judges to quash the trial judgment and declare the proceedings against them null and void. Their argument was that the Danish judge Frederik Harhoff had been one of the judges in the Trial Chamber that convicted them; in the meantime, he was disqualified because of allegations of bias.

Judge Liu sat on the special chamber that considered the Harhoff affair and was opposed to the disqualification of the Danish judge. He was outvoted. According to the defense, this makes it inappropriate to appoint him to the Appeals Chamber which is to rule on the motion to quash the judgment which was signed by the decommissioned judge Harhoff, because Liu has already made it clear he did not consider Harhoff biased.

Vice-president Agius rejected the motion for the disqualification of the Chinese judge in early December 2013, but the accused, first Zupljanin and then Stanisic, demanded that a three-judge panel be appointed to reconsider the decision. The two accused invoked a rule in the Tribunal's Rules of Procedure and Evidence that states, "where the President [...] has determined that it is not necessary to refer the matter to a panel of judges and decided the matter himself, and that decision is challenged, it becomes ‘necessary’ to refer the matter to a panel of three judges.”

Judge Agius invoked the rule in turn and appointed judges Howard Morrison, Christoph Flugge and Melville Baird to a new panel which will rule on the repeated motion of the two accused to disqualify Judge Liu.

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