THE HAGUE, April 28 – The U.N. war crimes court has ordered an independent medical assessment of lifetime inmate Ratko Mladic, after the 84-year-old Bosnian Serb general sought early release on health grounds, court documents published Tuesday showed.
Mladic is serving a life sentence for genocide and crimes against humanity in the 1992-95 war in Bosnia, and is currently held in the U.N. detention unit in The Hague.
The general filed a motion for early release on humanitarian grounds, the court said, because he is in a state of “advanced, irreversible medical decline resulting from a medical incident.”
That incident landed him briefly in a hospital emergency room earlier in April but additional details were redacted in the filings.
Now, a U.N. judge has ordered a report no later than May 1 assessing Mladic’s current health, life expectancy and standard of care in the detention unit and prison hospital.
The court previously found that while Mladic’s health condition was precarious, it was stable and well managed at the detention unit.
Mladic suffers from cognitive impairments, and following the medical incident, has been hospitalised multiple times in recent years, according to earlier court documents and hearings.
He led Bosnian Serb forces during Bosnia’s 1992-95 war, part of the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia.
Mladic was convicted on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, including terrorising the civilian population of Bosnian capital Sarajevo, and the killing of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys taken prisoner in the eastern town of Srebrenica in 1995. REUTERS