Martic Sentence Confirmed on Appeal

The Hague tribunal’s appeals chamber this week confirmed the 35-year prison sentence handed down to former rebel Serb leader in Croatia Milan Martic after he was found guilty of war crimes in 2007.



In their decision of October 8, appeals judges dismissed most of the defence and prosecution’s grounds for appeal, saying that those which were granted “did not warrant a revision of the sentence”.



During the war in Croatia in the early Nineties, Martic held the posts of minister of the interior, minister of defence and president of the self-proclaimed Serb autonomous region of Krajina.



On June 12, 2007, Martic was found guilty of taking part in a Joint Criminal Enterprise, JCE. The trial chamber found that virtually the entire Croat and other non-Serb population was expelled from Serb-held parts of Croatia between 1991 and 1995.



Martic was also found guilty of ordering indiscriminate rocket attacks on the city of Zagreb on May 2 and 3, 1995, in which seven people died and more than 200 were wounded.



Both the prosecution and the defence appealed the verdict.



However, this week, the appeals chamber confirmed Martic’s guilt on 16 counts of crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war, including persecutions, murder, torture, deportation, attacks on civilians and wanton destruction of civilian areas.



It granted only one of the prosecution’s grounds of appeal, in which it claimed that the trial chamber erred in law when it found that Croatian soldiers incapable of taking part in the hostilities – because they were injured or detained, for example – could not be victims of crimes against humanity.



But in their decision, appeals judges found that the trial chamber was wrong to find that persons “out of battle” – such as injured soldiers – were not included in the scope of crimes against humanity, when the crimes against them were part of a widespread or systematic attack on the civilian population.



Such people could be classed as victims of a crime against humanity – as long as other conditions of the crime were met, said the appeals judgement.



“A person hors de combat [out of battle] may…be the victim of an act amounting to a crime against humanity, provided that all other necessary conditions are met, in particular, that the act in question is part of a widespread and systematic attack against any civilian population,” it said.



But the appeals chamber found that this additional crime against humanity conviction did not mean the accused should receive a harsher sentence.



Appeals judges dismissed nine out of the ten grounds of Martic’s appeal, reversing his convictions relating to specific alleged crimes committed in Benkovac, Cerovljani, Vukovici and Poljanak.



Martic will remain in the tribunal’s detention unit until arrangements are finalised for his transfer to an as yet unnamed country where he will serve the rest of his sentence.



Merdijana Sadovic is IWPR’s Hague programme manager.