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Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic enters the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, 2017. Photo: EPA-EFE/PETER DEJONG / POOL

Bosnia’s mainly Serbian entity, Republika Srpska, on Thursday set aside 20,000 KM [around 10,000 euros] this year for people from the RS who are in the custody of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at The Hague, ICTY, and indicted for war crimes.

The main beneficiaries of this are Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb Army commander, and the former Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, both convicted in the first instance of genocide during the 1992-5 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The RS government last year granted the same amount to Karadzic’s and Mladic’s defence teams.

“The method, criteria and conditions for the use of the individual financial assistance … will be determined by a special rulebook which, with the consent of the entity’s Minister of Justice, will be adopted by the Republic Center for War Research, War Crimes and Search missing persons,” the RS government said.

The Hague court convicted Karadzic in a first-instance verdict in March 2016 of genocide in Srebrenica, persecution of Bosniaks and Croats across Bosnia, of terrorising the population of Sarajevo with a shelling and sniping campaign and of taking UN peacekeepers hostage. Last November, the same court in a first-instance verdict convicted Mladic of the same crimes – of genocide in Srebrenica, persecuting Croats and Bosniaks throughout Bosnia, terrorising Sarajevo and taking UN peacekeepers hostage.

Judge Theodor Meron, President of the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals, MICT, which took over unfinished cases from the ICTY, has said the final verdict in Karadzic’s case is expected in late 2019; in the case of Mladic, the date is unknown.