Mladic Defence Wants Prosecution’s Final Motion Rejected
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Mladic’s defence lawyers on Tuesday asked the Hague Tribunal judges to reject the final motion or return it to the prosecutors and order them to correct it and file it again in accordance with court regulations.
The defence claimed that the prosecution has significantly exceeded the allocated limit of 300,000 words.
Mladic’s lawyers alleged that the prosecutors misused the final motion annexes, which they did not include in the total word count, for presenting arguments concerning the essence of the entire case, which is not allowed, according to the rules.
Only one of those annexes contains around 90,000 words, while the entire final motion contains 390,000 words, the defence said.
Mladic’s defence lawyers and the prosecutors filed their final written motions on October 25, before the deadline set by the trial chamber, although the defence had previously filed an objection against the deadline.
The presentation of closing arguments, which will mark the end of the trial of Mladic, is scheduled for the beginning of December unless the Tribunal’s appeals chamber accepts the defence’s objection to the scheduled date.
The defence has also objected to the trial chamber’s rejection of its allegation that Mladic’s right to a fair trial has been violated.
The appeals chamber, presided over by judge Carmel Agius, the Hague Tribunal’s president, is expected to render a decision on the defence appeals soon.
Mladic, the wartime commander of the Bosnian Serb Army, has been charged with genocide in Srebrenica, persecution of Muslims and Croats throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, which allegedly reached the scale of genocide in six municipalities, terrorising the population of Sarajevo and taking UN peacekeepers hostage.
The trial began in May 2012, a year after the Serbian authorities arrested Mladic, who had been on the run since 1995, when the Tribunal filed the first indictment against him.
According to the Tribunal’s framework plan, the first instance verdict in Mladic’s case is due to be pronounced by November 2017.
