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Radovan Karadzic’s defence filed a motion on Tuesday to UN court president Theodor Meron, complaining that the court secretariat has not enabled the former Bosnian Serb political leader to make an online video calls even though two years have passed since he first filed a request, and despite Meron’s own promises to help.
“Although it has had more than enough time, the secretariat has failed to apply the video communications technology at the Detention Unit of the United Nations, primarily due to the fact that this has become an issue of lower priority,” the motion said.
In response to Karadzic’s previous requests for Skype, the secretariat said that a “pilot project” to use video services had encountered security, technical and organisational problems.
In the motion, Karadzic’s defence lawyer Peter Robinson expressed concern that because judge Meron is stepping down as the court’s president in January, efforts to allow detainees at the UN Detention Unit to use video communications might come to nothing.
Defendants can currently see their relatives if they visit the UN Detention Centre in the Netherlands, or talk to them on the phone if they purchase phone cards, but both are expensive.
In its first-instance verdict in March 2016, the Hague court sentenced Karadzic to 40 years in prison for genocide in Srebrenica, the persecution of Bosniaks and Croats throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, terrorising the population of Sarajevo and taking UN peacekeepers hostage.
Karadzic filed an appeal against the verdict. The Hague prosecution also appealed, calling on the court to also find him guilty of genocide in six other Bosnian municipalities and sentence him to life imprisonment.
It was planned that the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals, as the legal successor to the Hague Tribunal, would hand down the second-instance verdict in the Karadzic trial in December.
But the verdict will probably be postponed because presiding judge Meron removed himself from the appeals procedure in September after the former Bosnian Serb political leader’s defence accused him of bias, and a replacement was appointed.
