Belgrade Higher Court

Zeljko Bodrozic, president of the Independent Association of Journalists of Serbia, NUNS, said on Tuesday that the verdict sentencing journalist Milovan Brkic to 14 months in jail was proof that the country's judiciary has become an arm of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party.

Since the last annual commemoration of the Srebrenica genocide in July 2022, the Bosnian state prosecution has only filed one indictment for Srebrenica crimes - charging a suspect who lives in Serbia and cannot be arrested.

On July 13 and 14, 1995 Bosnian Serb forces killed 1,313 Bosniak men in the warehouse in the village of Kravica after they were captured following the fall of Srebrenica.

Tijana Vasic, the former sister-in-law of Milan Ivanovic, told Belgrade Higher Court on Monday that the defendant was at home with his family when the massacre of Kosovo Albanians in which he was allegedly involved took place in April 1999.

The Belgrade Higher Court has opened the trial of Lazar Mutlak, a Bosnian Serb wartime reserve policeman and member of Srpsko Gorazde Territorial Defence, for raping a Bosniak women on May 25, 1992.

According to the indictment, Mutlak entered the house of another civilian in the village of Lozje, in Gorazde municipality, where among others was a women of Bosniak nationality.

Dusan Loncar entered a not guilty plea at Belgrade Higher Court on Tuesday, insisting that he did not issue an order to attack the Croatian village of Lovas in October 1991, causing civilian casualties.

"After 32 years [since the attack], I saw that order for the first time when my lawyer got the documents [from the court] after the preparatory hearing," Loncar told the court.

The Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Centre on Monday criticised the Belgrade Court of Appeals' decision to reduce former police inspector Osman Osmanovic's war crimes sentence for prisoner abuse from five to three-and-a-half years in prison.

Vinko Pandurevic, wartime commander of the Bosnian Serb Army's Zvornik Brigade, told Belgrade Higher Court on Monday that Milenko Zivanovic, who commanded the Bosnian Serb Army's Drina Corps, did not run the Krivaja 95 operation in July 1995 which ended in the massacres of thousands of Bosniaks from Srebrenica.

Former Serbian State Security Unit for Special Operations, commander Milorad "Legija" Ulemek, refused to answer questions about the murder of Serbian journalist Slavko Curuvija at the Belgrade Court of Appeal.

Legija told the court that he stands by his 2014 statement from the investigation and his 2016 statement from the first trial.

Igor Despotovic, a Serbian citizen, pleaded not guilty to publicly inciting terrorism by posting on the Telegram and Instagram accounts he moderated.

Despotovic told the Belgrade Higher Court he had posted things "out of boredom" and because he wanted "to post religious content".