UN court upholds life sentence for Mladic

War crimes judges yesterday upheld the genocide conviction of former Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic over the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, Europe's worst act of bloodshed since World War II. 

The UN tribunal in The Hague rejected Mladic's appeal against his 2017 life sentence for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity over the 1992-5 Bosnian war.

Dubbed the "Butcher of Bosnia", the once burly general who is now in his late 70s sat impassively and listened to the judgement through headphones as it was read out by presiding judge Prisca Nyambe.

"The appeals chamber affirmed the sentence of life imprisonment imposed on Mr Mladic by the trial chamber," the tribunal in The Hague said in a statement.

The verdict by five judges at the UN International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals -- which deals with cases from the now-closed Yugoslavia war crimes tribunal -- is final and cannot be appealed any further.

Mothers of some of the 8,000 mostly Muslim men and boys killed in cold blood when Bosnian Serb troops overran Srebrenica were outside the court where they have long campaigned for justice.

"Today is a historic day, not only for us mothers, but also for the whole Balkans, Europe and the world," Munira Subasic, president of one of the "Mothers of Srebrenica" associations, told AFP outside court. At the genocide memorial near Srebrenica, a giant screen broadcast witness testimony ahead of the verdict, near the lines of white headstones where the bodies of some 6,600 identified victims are laid to rest.

Mladic was the military face of a brutal trio led on the political side by ex-Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic and former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.

Captured in 2011 after a decade on the run, Mladic was found guilty in 2017 of genocide for personally overseeing the massacre at the supposedly UN-protected enclave of Srebrenica.

Footage from the time showed him handing out sweets to children before they and the women of Srebrenica were taken away by bus, while the men of the town were marched into a forest and executed.

Mladic was also found guilty of orchestrating a wider campaign of "ethnic cleansing" to drive Muslims and Bosnians out of key areas to create a Greater Serbia as Yugoslavia tore itself apart after the fall of communism.

The war left around 100,000 people dead and 2.2 million displaced.