The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia will decide on Thursday on former Yugoslav Army Chief-Of-Staff Momcilo Perisic's appeal against a verdict sentencing him to 27 years' imprisonment for crimes committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia.
At an appeals hearing last October, the defence moved the sentence be quashed as unfounded, citing numerous legal and factual errors, while the prosecution said the sentence was appropriate to the crimes. The defence said that Perisic's help to the Bosnian Serb army in the war could not be equated with aiding and abetting the crimes committed in that war.
The Hague tribunal sentenced Perisic in September 2011 to 27 years for aiding and abetting the years-long siege of Sarajevo and the killing of thousands of Muslims in Srebrenica, as well as for failing to punish his subordinates for the shelling of Zagreb. He was acquitted, however, of the extermination in Srebrenica, with the judges finding that he could not have foreseen the scale of the atrocity committed there in July 1995.
Most judges found that General Perisic's actions had significantly contributed to the crimes committed by the Bosnian Serb army.
With regard to the May 1995 shelling of Zagreb, the defence argued in the appeal that the evidence did not show that the perpetrators had been subordinate to Perisic.
Addressing the appeals chamber, Perisic said the trial verdict drastically punished him for warfare, although neither warfare nor helping others in war were illegal.
He surrendered to the tribunal on 7 March 2005 and was released pending trial which began on 2 October 2008.
