The wartime Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic, indicted for genocide and other crimes during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, was removed from the courtroom of the Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) on Monday after he disrupted the presiding judge's attempts to read out charges against him.
Presiding Judge Alphons Orie decided to order Mladic's removal from the courtroom after the indictee persistently refused to enter a plea and interrupted the judge several times.
While being taken by the courtroom's security, Mladic was shouting that he was being denied the right to defend himself.
"You are not a court. You do not let me breath," said this former Bosnian Serb military leader, accused of the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995 and other atrocities against non-Serbs in Bosnia.
Mladic was scheduled to have entered a plea on Monday after the plea entry procedure was postponed at his very first appearance before this UN tribunal a month ago.
Today, Mladic insisted on new postponement as lawyers whom he proposed had not yet been approved by the tribunal's registry. He is being represented by a court-appointed lawyer, Aleksandar Aleksic from Serbia, but Mladic is refusing to communicate with him.
The judge said the court was still looking into allowing Mladic to be represented in future by other lawyers of his choice: Serb Milos Saljic and Russian Alexander Mezyayev.
The procedure of checking those two lawyers should be finished by the tribunal's registry by 1 August.
With Judge Orie beginning to read out counts of the indictment to which Mladic should have pleaded guilty or not guilty, the indictee disrupted the judge with the angry statement that he would not listen to it without his lawyers present and he removed his translation headphones which was why the judge ordered his removal from the courtroom by the security.
After a short break, the session resumed without Mladic's presence and with the trial chamber entering formal pleas of not guilty on behalf of Mladic, as envisaged by the tribunal's rule book in the event of the indictee's refusal to enter a plea.
At the beginning of today's hearing Judge Orie also warned Mladic against unacceptable communication with the public in the courtroom's gallery in light of the fact that at his initial appearance before the court on 3 June Mladic resorted to inappropriate nonverbal communication with a woman from Bosnia, who was among representatives of victims.
Orie also stated that the findings of medical examinations of Mladic conducted in the tribunal's detention centre showed that there was no reasons for Mladic not to be put on the trial.
Mladic was arrested in Serbia on 26 May after being on the run for 16 years. At the 3 June hearing he dismissed charges against him as "obnoxious" and "monstrous".
