Ratko Mladic filed the request to be released on health grounds last month, saying he only had a few months to live.
A United Nations war crimes court has denied a request from Ratko Mladic, an infamous Bosnian Serb military leader during the 1992 to 1995 Yugoslav wars, who oversaw the Srebrenica massacre, to be released early to Serbia on health grounds.
Judge Graciela Gatti Santana at the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, the court tasked with handling remaining cases from the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal, said on Tuesday that Mladic’s condition did not meet the threshold of an “acute terminal illness” required for early release.
Mladic, known as the “Butcher of Bosnia”, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2017 over genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. He had filed a request to be freed on June 3, 2025, saying he only had a few months to live.
“I acknowledge that Mladic’s current condition, which requires dependency on others for activities of daily living, is precarious,” Santana said in a 12-page decision issued in The Hague on Tuesday.
“Nonetheless, Mladic continues to receive very comprehensive and compassionate care, as amply supported by medical reports.
“The information before me demonstrates that the compelling humanitarian circumstances invoked by Mladic as a basis for his release are not substantiated.”
Mladic, 83, was sentenced by the UN tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for his role in terrorising the civilian population during the 43-month siege of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo and the 1995 Srebrenica massacre.
Some 8,000 Muslim men and boys were slaughtered in Srebrenica by Bosnian Serb forces in July that year.
People pray among the gravestones of Srebrenica victims [Urooba Jamal/Al Jazeera]
The Srebrenica genocide was the bloody crescendo of the Bosnian war, which erupted during Yugoslavia’s dissolution, as Bosnian Serbs sought to carve out Serb-dominated areas by ethnic cleansing against the country’s two other main ethnic populations – Croats and Muslim Bosniaks. Until the Russia-Ukraine war, the Bosnian war was considered the most violent conflict in Europe since the end of World War II.
Mladic has long been described by his lawyers as sick and frail. In their latest request, they said he suffered from an incurable illness and that “his remaining life expectancy is measured in months,” according to a filing seen by the AFP news agency.
His defence first sought provisional release on medical grounds in 2017.
Santana said Mladic’s continued incarceration was neither “inhuman nor degrading”.
Mladic was arrested in Serbia in 2011 after 16 years on the run and is serving his sentence in The Hague.
His son, Darko, often speaks to Serbian media about the poor health of his father, who is still seen as a hero by nationalists in Serbia.