The Bosnian Serb war criminal Radovan Karadžić is seeking a judicial review to allow him to sue Britain for inhumane treatment and pave the way for a challenge to his conviction and sentence.
Karadžić, labelled the “Butcher of Bosnia”, has lodged his application at the high court in London in an attempt to overturn the Legal Aid Agency’s refusal to fund his complaints over his treatment at Albany prison in the Isle of Wight.
The former Bosnian Serb leader, who will be 81 in June, was sentenced in 2016 in The Hague to life imprisonment for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity during the Bosnian war between 1992 and 1995. He was transferred to Albany, a category B men’s prison, in 2021 from a UN detention centre in the Netherlands.
Karadžić has complained that he has been denied access to a laptop to prepare submissions to try to get his conviction and sentence reviewed. He has also complained about being denied access to a Serbian Orthodox priest and accused the Prison Service of subjecting him to unreasonable restrictions on his ability to phone his family.
According to his UK legal team, he has been told he has to speak to his family in English and is punished with loss of privileges if anyone on the other end of the line speaks in Serbian or if a child not authorised to talk to him answers the phone.
A Prison Service spokesperson said: “We do not recognise any of these claims.”
His lawyer, Mladen Kesar, who has taken on this case under a no win, no fee agreement, lodged an application for a judicial review to reverse the Legal Aid Agency’s refusal to grant Karadžić funding. “Whatever we think about his crime and his conviction, and whether it’s justified or appealable or anything, it’s not about that,” he said. “Everyone who is convicted of a criminal offence should have the right to challenge that.”
The official reason for refusing legal aid was that the costs of funding the complaint would be much greater than the potential damages he could win. But Kesar argued that Karadžić, who is subject to UN sanctions and has no money, has been denied his rights for political reasons because of his notoriety.
Karadžić, a former psychiatrist who became president of the self-proclaimed Bosnian Serb breakaway state, was tried by the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. He was convicted over the genocide of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995 and other atrocities in the war, in which about 100,000 died. His 40-year sentence was increased to life without parole after an appeal by both the prosecution and defence in 2019.
The Legal Aid Agency declined to comment.
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