A UN war crimes court in The Hague has denied a last-ditch appeal by former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and said its ruling was final, likely closing the books on the decades-old case stemming from the 1990s Bosnian civil war.
Tribunal judges on April 3 said that "there is no legal basis...for Karadzic to appeal the appeal," a ruling last month that upheld his 2016 conviction for genocide in the Srebrenica massacre and other atrocities during the civil war.
On March 20, the court ruled against the 73-year-old Karadzic's appeals against his convictions of genocide and war crimes in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the 1990s.
It also extended his 40-year sentence to life in prison and, at the time, said its ruling was final.
Karadzic's lawyer then filed a last-ditch attempt to overturn his client's sentencing, arguing that Karadzic's latest effort "may be distinguishable since he seeks to appeal only his sentence" -- and not the verdict.
The original case centered on Karadzic's role in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, his orchestration of a nearly four-year siege of Sarajevo, and war crimes committed in 20 Bosnian municipalities for which Karadzic was convicted in 2016.
The ruling was handed down by the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, a UN court that is dealing with cases left over from the now-defunct trial court, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.