Hague Judge Again Denies Early Release to ‘Serb Adolf’

The Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague. Foto: EPA-EFE/KOEN VAN WEEL

The Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague on Thursday denied a release request from former Bosnian Serb detention camp guard Goran Jelisic, who is serving a 40-year sentence for crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war.

Jelisic made the request after the authorities in Italy, where he is serving his sentence, gave him remissions of 405 days, which he said made him eligible for early release in October 2020 because he had served two-thirds of his sentence.

He also said that his “rehabilitation process has improved significantly” since his previous request for early release was rejected by the UN court in 2017.

But the UN court’s president, Carmel Agius, said in his decision that even if Jelisic becomes eligible for release under Italian law due to its system of sentence remissions, Italy is still bound by the duration of the sentence that was initially imposed by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

Agius said that “any departure from this minimum time period” would result in “unequal treatment” for convicts serving sentences in countries in which the conditions for early release are different.

Durig the war in 1992, Jelisic was a senior guard at the Luka detention camp in the Bosnian town of Brcko, where hundreds of Bosniaks and Croats were held prisoner.

He admitted at his trial that he was guilty of a series of murders and inhumane acts in Brcko.

The verdict noted Jelisic’s “enthusiasm for committing the crimes, the inhumanity of the crimes and the dangerous nature evidenced by [his] behaviour”.

The previous decision in 2017 to reject Jelisic’s request for early release cited the gravity of his crimes and noted that he admitted to the Hague court that he called himself “a Serbian Adolf Hitler whose motivation and goal was to kill Muslims”.