Radovan Karadžić

The Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals has decided to discontinue a pilot project that enabled the Hague war crimes court's detainees to make and receive video calls via the internet, saying there were security concerns.

"The challenges in investigating and prosecuting genocide were immense," Alan Tieger, who was in charge of the case against Radovan Karadzic at the UN court in The Hague, told BIRN ahead of the 24th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacres on Thursday.

Dunja Mijatovic said at the opening of an exhibition entitled 'Srebrenica - Mothers' Long Fight for Justice' in Strasbourg on Wednesday that the Council of Europe should mark July 11 as an official remembrance day for the victims of Srebrenica.

The registrar's office at Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals has said that it will listen in on Radovan Karadzic's telephone calls for several days after he addressed a public debate in Montenegro by phone from the UN Detention Unit in the Netherlands.

The Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals has so far not taken any action to sanction Radovan Karadzic after he addressed a public discussion in Montenegro over the telephone from the UN Detention Unit in the Netherlands, his lawyer Peter Robinson told BIRN on Monday.

The Srebrenica massacres were classified as genocide by the UN-backed International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice.

The regime of Radovan Karadzic was not totalitarian in the sense that Nazism or Stalinism were; yet it was a regime that existed solely for the purpose of murder - the physical annihilation of non-Serbs, or more specifically, Bosnian Muslims.

Let me quote from Karadzic's court verdict a description of some of the events that took place in Rogatica in eastern Bosnia during the war:

Radovan Karadzic in court in April 2016. Photo: EPA/ROBIN VAN LONKHUIJSEN/POOL.

Former Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic has submitted an appeal against the decision not to allow him to appeal his second-instance verdict, sentencing him to life in prison for genocide in Srebrenica, among other crimes.

Vasvija Vidovic, a lawyer who has represented former Bosnian Army soldiers at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the Bosnian state court, argued that defendants find themselves difficult financial situations because trials are long-running and very expensive.

"The Serb people and myself together with it, have already won. The Serb Republic (RS, the Serb entity in Bosnia-Herzegovina) has been created, and the Serb people are free in their own state," Karadzic is quoted as saying, and adding: