ICTY: Dusko Tadic released

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, ICTY, approved the provisional release of Dusko Tadic, who has served two thirds of his 20-years imprisonment sentence for the crimes committed in Prijedor.

Tadic asked the Court to deport him to Serbia, whose citizenship he obtained in March 2006, after his release from the prison.

Dusko Tadic, who was the first ICTY indictee, was sentenced, in 2000, to 20 years’ imprisonment for crimes committed in the Omarska detention camp in Prijedor municipality in the course of 1992, when he was president of the local board of the Serbian Democratic Party, SDS, in Kozarac. Later that year he was transferred to Germany to serve his sentence.

The decision, passed by the ICTY on July 17 this year, indicated that the Republic of Serbia “was willing to receive Tadic”, adding that there were no obstacles to the fulfillment of his request. 

“I consider that Tadic has shown some signs of rehabilitation. He regularly performs his work in the prison kitchen. He has not been sanctioned, by any disciplinary measures, during the course of his imprisonment. Despite the fact that the letter from the German prison indicates that he has not shown any regret for having committed the crimes, I consider that this statement cannot be very relevant, in the absence of a psychological report,” says the written decision, signed by judge Fausto Pocar, the Tribunal President. 

Tadic had served two thirds of his sentence in June 2007 already. However, in his correspondence with the Tribunal and the Serbian Embassy at The Hague, he said that he did not want to be released earlier because he was “not sure if he would be allowed to go back to Serbia” and he was afraid of “the German authorities misusing” his provisional release.

Tadic was arrested in Munich, Germany, in 1994. He was then transferred to the Tribunal. The trial against him, which lasted for 79 days, commenced in 1996.