Mico Stanisic i Stojan Zupljanin in the courtroom

The appellate hearing in the case against Mico Stanisic and Stojan Zupljanin, former Bosnian Serb police officials, will be held in 2015, not in late 2014 as previously planned.

At a regular status conference in the appellate proceedings, Judge Carmel Agius recalled that Stanisic and Zupljanin wanted the Appeals Chamber to re-consider its decision rejecting the defense's motion for a mistrial. The Appeals Chamber will render its decision on the motion ‘very soon’, Judge Agius indicated.

The motions for the reversal of the trial judgment were based on the purported bias of Judge Frederik Harhoff, who was one of the judges in the Trial Chamber hearing Stanisic's and Zupljanin's case. Judge Harhoff has in the meantime been disqualified from the Trial Chamber in the case against Vojislav Seselj.

Former RS police minister Mico Stanisic and Stojan Zupljanin, chief of the Banja Luka Security Services Center, didn’t have any complaints about the conditions in the detention and didn’t report any health problems.

Stanisic and Zupljanin were sentenced to 22 years in prison each for the crimes against Bosnian Croats and Muslims in 1992. The Trial Chamber found Stanisic and Zupljanin guilty of persecution, murder, torture and other crimes perpetrated as part of a joint criminal enterprise aimed at the permanent elimination of Bosnian Muslims and Croats from the territories that were supposed to become parts of a Serb state.

Sharing