Appeals judges at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal on Tuesday upheld the acquittal of a former Bosnian Muslim army commander over atrocities in the 1992 to 1995 Bosnian War.
Sefer Halilovic, former Deputy Commander and Chief of Main Staff of the Muslim-dominated Bosnian Army, was cleared in November 2005 of a single war crimes charge linked to the murder of Bosnian Croat civilians in two villages in 1993.
A five-judge appeals panel at the UN court said prosecutors failed to raise any arguments to overturn the original verdict.
The charge against Halilovic was based on the theory of command responsibility -- that he was in control of troops responsible for the murders but failed to prevent or punish the crimes.
Trial judges ruled in 2005 that prosecutors failed to establish Halilovic was in effective command and the appeals judges upheld that finding.
"The prosecution failed to show that no reasonable trier of fact could have reached the conclusion that Sefer Halilovic did not have the required degree of `effective control' over the perpetrators ... to establish his superior responsibility," presiding Judge Fausto Pocar said.
Halilovic traveled to The Hague and was in court for Tuesday's ruling. He showed no emotion when the panel upheld his acquittal but kissed and hugged supporters outside the courtroom after the hearing. He made no immediate comment.
Prosecutors originally argued that Halilovic controlled troops who murdered civilians in the villages of Grabovica and Uzdol, which were occupied by Muslim forces seeking to end a blockade by Bosnian Croats of the city of Mostar in September 1993.
The three-judge trial panel said it was proven that women, children and innocent civilians had been murdered, but that prosecutors had failed to establish beyond reasonable doubt that Halilovic was in control of forces that committed the war crimes.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees