Hague prosecutor wants revision of Perišić's acquittal

Hague prosecutor wants revision of Perišić's acquittal

“In our motion, we submit that the erroneous reversal of Mr. Perišić's lawful convictions and 27 year sentence must be corrected to redress the grave injustice caused to the tens of thousands of men, women and children killed or injured in Sarajevo and Srebrenica and to their families,” ICTY Chief Prosecutor Serge Brammertz stated.

“This motion was filed, after careful deliberations, by my Office as a direct consequence of the Šainović Appeal Judgement delivered on January 23, 2014,” Brammertz said in a statement for the media.

“In that Judgement, the ICTY Appeals Chamber unequivocally overturned the Perišić Appeal Judgement's flawed holding that 'specific direction' is an element of aiding and abetting liability. It was on the basis of this 'specific direction' requirement that the aiding and abetting convictions entered by the Trial Chamber were reversed and Mr. Perišić was erroneously acquitted on appeal,” states the release for the media.

On February 28, 2013, the ICTY Appeal Chamber adopted the appeal filed by the defense team and acquitted General Perišić on all points of the indictment.

The Chamber established that the assistance which VJ headed by Perišić provided to the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) was not given in keeping with a 'specific direction' to commit war crimes in Sarajevo and Srebrenica, but was rather a 'general war effort' of VRS.

“VRS was not subordinate to VJ either de jure or de facto,” Chair of the Trial Chamber judge Theodor Meron said.

Meron noted that assistance of one army to another in war efforts is insufficient grounds to rule on criminal responsibility of an individual who provided the assistance, in the absence of evidence that the direct purpose of the assistance was to commit a crime.

In the case against Šainović and two more military and one police general, the ICTY Trial Chamber chaired by judge Liu Daqun rejected a part of the appeal filed by the defence team of General Vladimir Lazarević which said that the actions of the defendants during the conflicts in Kosovo in 1999 were not guided by a 'specific direction' to commit a crime.

According to the explanation of the ruling, the Trial Chamber did not have to establish whether Lazarević's actions were guided by 'specific direction' to aid, abet or offer moral support to crime.

Since the ICTY Trial Chamber assumed a different stand than that in the case against General Perišić, four officials of the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia were found guilty of forcible deportation of around 700,000 Albanians and murder of 600 people in the armed conflicts in Kosovo and Metohija, and they were sentenced by a first-degree ruling to 15 to 22 years of imprisonment.