Ratko Mladic at his appeal hearing in The Hague in 2020. Photo: Flickr/IRMCT.

Defence lawyers for wartime Bosnian Serb Army commander Ratko Mladic are calling for his immediate release on humanitarian grounds after a serious medical incident brought him closer to death, according to the motion made public on Friday by the UN’s International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals in The Hague.

The motion says that Mladic, 84, who is serving a life sentence for geocide and other wartime crimes, “is in a state of advanced, irreversible medical decline resulting from a medical incident … and is approaching the end of his life”.

The motion said Mladic recently suffered an “acute neurological/medical episode characterised by sudden total aphasia (ie. loss of the ability to speak) and difficulty swallowing during a video call with his son (Darko), requiring emergency hospitalisation”.

Serbian-speaking doctors who visited Mladic after the incident said that his condition is “serious, life-threatening (ie. that risk of imminent death is high), and such that it cannot be adequately treated in the hospital prison”, the motion adds.

Mladic’s lawyers are calling for his immediate conditional or provisional release to a specialised hospital or hospice.

The Bosnian Serb Army general was convicted under a final verdict in June 2021 of the genocide of Bosniaks from Srebrenica, the persecution of Bosniaks and Croats across the country during the 1992-5 war in Bosnia, terrorising the population of Sarajevo with a campaign of shelling and sniping during the siege of the city, and taking UN peacekeepers hostage.

During his time in custody in the Netherlands, Mladic has had several serious medical problems and has suffered several strokes and a heart attack.

In June last year, his lawyers also appealed for his release, saying he only had months to live. The UN court rejected the request, accepting that his condition was “precarious” but insisting that he is getting high-quality medical care in detention in the Netherlands.