Abstract

Twenty-two years after the Srebrenica genocide, the worst war crime post World War II, the former Serbian general Ratko Mladić was sentenced to life imprisonment on 22 November 2017 by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. Shortly before it closed as an institution, the Tribunal thus once again attracted attention with its high-profile conviction. The reaction was considerable. Although there was satisfaction at Mladić’s sentence in many quarters, the judgment unsurprisingly met with rejection in the Balkans, for example in parts of Serbia where Mladić is sometimes still being celebrated as a war hero. By imposing the penalty of life imprisonment, the Tribunal had opted for the most severe of all the penal sanctions available to it.