Judges increase Bosnian Serb war criminal’s sentence to life on appeal

A panel of United Nations appeals judges on Wednesday upheld a former Bosnian Serb leader’s convictions on genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity at the Hague war crimes court, according to a report in The Associated Press.

The judges also gave a life sentence to Radovan Karadzic, who served as the Serbian Republic’s president during the Bosnian War.

{mosads}Karadzic was arrested in 2008 and was initially found guilty and sentenced to 40 years in prison in 2016. He appealed that decision the same year.

Presiding Judge Vagn Joensen of Denmark said Wednesday that Karadzic’s initial 40-year sentence did not adequately address the “sheer scale and systematic cruelty” of his crimes, according to the AP.

The panel of judges did, however, overturn one element from his 2016 conviction involving illegal detention of civilians on the grounds that he had not been allowed to cross-examine witnesses, the AP said.

Karadzic’s convictions included ordering the July 1995 massacre of thousands of Muslim boys and men at Srebrenica, Bosnia. He had signed an order earlier that year calling for conditions in the city to be made “unbearable with no hope of further survival,” according to The Guardian.

Judge Joensen, reading the verdict, noted that Karadzic also “failed to demonstrate error” in the court’s earlier findings that he ordered Sarajevo shelled without distinction between civilians and military targets, according to The Guardian.