The United Nations war crimes tribunal set up in the wake of the Balkan conflicts in the 1990s has upheld the conviction of a Bosnian Serb army officer who was given a four-month jail sentence earlier this year for refusing to testify in a case.The appeals chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which sits in The Hague, announced on Friday that it had dismissed the appeal of Dragan Jokic against the conviction and sentence issued by the trial chamber in March.
Mr. Jokic had been subpoenaed to testify as a prosecution witness in the case of Popovic and others in late 2007, but refused to do so, giving his reasons in a confidential submission to the ICTY.
The trial chamber ruled that the submission did not justify the refusal to testify, stressing that the duty of subpoenaed witnesses to testify was a basic principle of justice.
Mr. Jokic will serve his four-month sentence in an Austrian jail where he is also serving a separate nine-year term imposed by the ICTY in 2005 after he was convicted of aiding and abetting the notorious extermination, murder and persecution of Bosnian Muslim men in the town of Srebrenica – which was supposed to be a safe haven – in July 1995
