A judge in The Hague rejected 71-year-old war criminal Martic’s appeal for early release for a second time, citing his ‘refusal to accept responsibility for his crimes’.
Vuk Tesija
Milan Martic in the courtroom in The Hague, October 2008. Photo: EPA/TOUSSAINT KLUITERS.
The International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals in The Hague on Monday said it has again denied early release to Milan Martic, one of the wartime political leaders of the Serbs in Croatia, who is serving a 35-year prison sentence for war crimes.
Presiding Judge Graciela Gatti Santana said Martic had demonstrated good behaviour in the Estonian prison where he is serving his sentence, but “no information suggests that Martic had accepted responsibility for his crimes, demonstrated signs of critical reflection, or expressed genuine remorse or regret”.
The judge concluded that “he has not yet reached a level of rehabilitation sufficient to merit early release”.
“The Estonian authorities reported that Martic ‘considers himself a political prisoner’ and, generally speaking, does not want to talk about his crimes, believing that the sentence imposed on him was politically motivated,” Gatti Santana noted in her decision.
Similiar reasons were cited by the same judge in February this year when she rejected his previous request for early release from prison.
In his latest request for release, Martic cited his advanced age – 71 – and health conditions. However, the judge rejected those arguments, saying that she “found no indication that Martic’s health may be an impediment to his continued imprisonment”.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, ICTY, found Martic guilty of violations of the laws or customs of war, as well as crimes against humanity, sentencing him to 35 years in prison. He has been serving his sentence in Estonia since 2009.
The crimes of which he was convicted took place in the self-proclaimed Republic of Serbian Krajina, an unrecognised rebel statelet of which Martic was president. The Croatian Army recaptured the territory during Operation Storm in the summer of 1995, triggering the mass exodus of Serbs from Croatia.
Martic was also convicted of ordering rocket attacks on Zagreb in May 1995 after an earlier Croatian Army operation, which killed seven people and injured 214 others. In a separate case, in 2020, Zagreb County Court also convicted Martic in absentia of ordering rocket attacks on Croatian cities in 1995.
