International criminal law

The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network on Wednesday published its updated and improved War Crimes Verdicts Map, enabling users to search rulings in cases from courts across the former Yugoslavia and from the UN tribunal in The Hague.

Two sailors were injured in an attack by a group of 7-8 gunmen on an Italian ship in the Gulf of Mexico, RIA Novosti reports.

The pirates boarded two cutters and shot at the crew. Its members are robbed.

Pirates attacked a Greek oil tanker off the coast of Togo in the early hours of Monday and fled after taking four crew members as hostages, the West African nation's navy said, two days after a similar attack in the waters of neighboring Benin. 

The UN's Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague on Monday said it has refused to consider a request by lawyers for Radovan Karadzic, who was convicted of genocide and other wartime crimes, to have two judges he accuses of bias to be disqualified from making decisions in his case.

The three-day training course on transitional justice reporting, organised by BIRN in cooperation with the United Nations Development Programme, UNDP, started in the Serbian capital Belgrade on Monday.

The Bosnian prosecution on Thursday charged Radovan Paprica, alias Papro, and Slavko Ognjenovic, alias Macak, with committing crimes against humanity in Foca in eastern Bosnia in 1992 while they were members of the Bosnian Serb Army.

The Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals on Wednesday denied Radovan Karadzic's motion for an appeal chamber to be appointed at the Hague court to decide on his request to review a previous decision that rejected his appeal against the final verdict in his trial sentencing him to life in prison.

Radovan Karadzic in the courtroom in The Hague in March 2016. Photo: EPA/ROBIN VAN LONKHUIJSEN/POOL.

The UN's war crimes court has yet to decide here the former Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic will be sent to serve his life sentence, BIRN has learned.

Radovan Karadzic's lawyer Peter Robinson said on Monday that the decision not to allow inmates at the United Nations Detention Unit in the Netherlands was wrong because it prevented his client, a long-term detainee, from communicating with his family.

The Council of Ministers, the executive branch of Bosnia and Herzegovina's state-level government, has been criticised for again failing on Tuesday evening to consider a revised national strategy to clear up the country's large backlog of war crimes cases.