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UN appeals court increases sentences for two Serbs convicted of crimes in Balkan wars

United Nations appeals judges on Wednesday significantly expanded the convictions of two allies of late Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, holding them responsible for involvement in crimes across Bosnia and in one town in Croatia as members of a joint criminal plan to drive out non-Serbs from the areas during the Balkan wars.

The appeals chamber at the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals overturned their acquittals of involvement in the criminal plan and raised the sentences of Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic from 12 to 15 years.

Presiding Judge Graciela Gatti Santana said the two men, both now in their 70s, “shared the intent to further the common criminal purpose to forcibly and permanently remove the majority of non-Serbs from large areas of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina through the commission of the crimes charged in the indictment.”

The appeals ruling brings to an end the longest-running war crimes prosecution dating back to the Balkan wars of the early 1990s.

Neither man showed any emotion as Gatti Santana passed down the sentence.

Stanisic was in court for the hearing, while Simatovic watched by video link from a UN detention unit.

Gatti Santana called the appeals ruling a 'milestone' for the court – which deals with cases left over from the now-defunct UN war crimes courts for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda – as it was the final case dealing with war crimes from the wars that erupted in the early 1990s as Yugoslavia crumbled.

Stanisic and Simatovic were convicted two years ago of aiding and abetting murder and other crimes committed by Serb paramilitaries in 1992 in the Bosnian town of Bosanski Samac but acquitted of responsibility for other crimes. The appeals chamber reversed both those findings and raised their sentences.

The length of the case underscores the complexity of successfully proving war crimes in international courts, amid international calls for perpetrators of atrocities during the current war in Ukraine to be brought to justice.

Stanisic, a former head of Serbia’s State Security Service, and Simatovic, a senior intelligence operative with the service, are the only Serbian officials to have been convicted by a UN court of involvement in crimes in Bosnia.

Milosevic was put on trial for his alleged involvement in fomenting the bloody conflicts that erupted as Yugoslavia crumbled but he died in his cell in 2006 before verdicts could be reached.

Stanisic and Simatovic initially were acquitted a decade ago by the UN's Yugoslav war crimes tribunal but an appeals chamber later ordered a retrial.