Hague Court Denies Early Release to ‘Unrehabilitated’ Convicts

Miletic is serving his sentence in a prison in Finland. According to Finnish law, as well as the longstanding practices of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY and its successor, the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals, MICT, Miletic had the right to seek early release, but the judges who sentenced him expressed disagreement with his early release considering the severity of his crimes.

One of those judges, Carmel Agius, told then MICT president Theodor Meron that another reason to reject Miletic's request was because he had demonstrated "no signs of rehabilitation whatsoever".

"According to judge Agius, the fact that Miletic recognises the severity of his actions, as he has stated through his defence attorney, is by no means sufficient to demonstrate rehabilitation, particularly considering the fact that Miletic was 'cold, argumentative and uncompromising' throughout the first instance trial," Meron wrote in his decision.

At the beginning of 2019, only a few months after the decision in the Miletic case, Agius became the MICT's president and continued the practice of seeking evidence about rehabilitation when deciding on early release requests.

In January this year, he rejected a request from wartime Croatian Defence Council fighter Miroslav Bralo, who asked to be released early from a Swedish prison where he is serving his 20-year sentence for the killings of Bosniak civilians, including children, in the village of Ahmici, near Vitez, in 1993.

"I generally do not consider it appropriate to enable convicted persons to return to the affected regions before they have served their full sentence, without having demonstrated a certain degree of rehabilitation, including that their release will not...