Milosevic to appeal defence lawyer decision

Slobodan Milosevic has protested at a court decision to assign a defence lawyer to him in his trial in the Hague for war crimes.

Milosevic has said he will appeal the decision.

“The assignment of counsel directly violates my fundamental rights,” he said.

He called the decision “a violation of international law, every conceivable covenant on human rights”, adding that it was “a scandal”.

“You cannot deny me the right to defend myself.”

Also yesterday, another three-judge bench of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia acquitted a Bosnian Serb leader of genocide, but convicted him of eight other charges.

The verdict in the five-year trial of Radislav Brdjanin, wartime leader of the autonomous Krajina region of Bosnia, should encourage Milosevic, who also faces charges of genocide among more than 60 counts of war crimes.

Brdjanin, 56, a powerful Serb figure at the start of the Bosnian war in 1992, was convicted on eight of 12 charges and sentenced to 32 years imprisonment.

Despite a Serb campaign of mass murder, torture and deportations of non-Serbs, the court said the brutality fell short of genocide, which requires stringent proof the sole intent was to wipe out the Muslim and Croat communities.

The acquittal was a setback for prosecutors who placed genocide at the centre of Milosevic’s indictment. He is accused of responsibility for the deaths of more than 7,500 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in the UN-protected enclave of Srebrenica in 1995.

Presiding judge Patrick Robinson said two court-assigned doctors who examined 63-year-old Milosevic concluded that he suffers "severe essential hypertension'' and that continuing to represent himself could lead to "a potentially life threatening situation''.

"They said that by allowing him to continue representing himself “there is a real danger that this trial might last an unreasonably long time”, Robinson said.

Assigning a defence lawyer “is in the interests of justice. We will, therefore, do so.”

Milosevic’s bouts with fatigue and high blood pressure have already caused the suspension of hearings more than a dozen times and the loss of 66 trial days since the case went to court in February 2002.