Radovan Karadzic, Sarajevo is not your city, and you have no right to say that it is, just as you do not have the right to say in public, even if it’s in court, that someone has dug up bones around Bosnia and brought them to Srebrenica to make a fake graveyard. This is insulting.
Karadzic Files Motion to Postpone
| 01 February 2010 |
In his latest motion to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, ICTY, Karadzic claims that his "rights to adequate facilities and to choose his standby counsel have been violated by the Registrar" and because of that it was imposible for him to prepare for the trial.
Karadzic asked for a postponement during the status conference last week, but the Trial Chamber ordered him to file a written motion.
Presiding judge O-Gon Kwon said that the Trial Chamber is determined to see the trial continue on the scheduled day.
In his motion, Karadzic writes that on November 5, 2009, the Trial Chamber appointed Richard Harvey as his standby counsel, a counsel that Karadzic maintains he "cannot trust".
Karadzic claims that since November he has been preparing his own defence because funding for his team was suspended.
"Meanwhile, the prosecution furnished an additional 300,000 pages of disclosure and filed motions for admission of almost 2000 documents and adjudicated facts. Dr. Karadzic has fallen even further behind in his trial preparation, having no case managers to review, process, and organize these documents and no investigators to help him refute the prosecution’s case," the motion reads.
Karadzic, who is indicted for crimes against humanity and war crimes committed from 1992 to 1995 in Bosnia, was arrested in July 2008 and since then has managed to postpone aspects of his trial. However, the trial did begin last fall with the prosecution's opening statements, but Karadzic did not appear in the courtroom, claiming he was not ready.
After the prosecution gave its opening arguments, the Trial Chamber decided to give Karadzic more time to prepare and appointed a counsel for him. He appealed this decision twice, and the final decision on the court-appointed counsel is still pending.
At the last status conference on January 28, Richard Harvey watched from the public gallery since, as the Chamber said, he is still waiting for the final decision on his appointment.
The Trial Chamber scheduled one more status conference for February 15 when representatives from different countries, including Bosnia and Herzegovina, will be called into the courtroom to talk about the status of documents Karadzic has requested from them.
Since his arrest, Karadzic has asked some 30 countries to hand over documents he considers relevant for his defence. About twenty countries have done so, but a few still haven’t complied with all the requests.
