Dutch authorities will not open a criminal investigation into the death of Ratko Mladic, the convicted Bosnian Serb war criminal who spent his final days in custody in The Hague, a UN court said.
Mladic, who was serving a life sentence for genocide and war crimes committed during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, died in hospital on Thursday after suffering several strokes in recent months.
Even his age has long been contested.
He maintained he was born in March 1943, while the tribunal recorded his birth year as 1942, and local media widely reported that he died at the age of 84.
The International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals Mechanism said Dutch officials had followed the steps required under national law.
They concluded “that no criminal investigation would be opened and that they would not be conducting an autopsy”, the statement said.
At the same time, the Mechanism said it had assigned a judge, Iain Bonomy, to carry out a separate review into the circumstances of Mladic’s death. That inquiry remains underway and, for now, its details are confidential, it added.
Days before Mladic died, on Monday, Serbian authorities urged that he be released on health grounds so he could receive treatment in Serbia.
The Mechanism had already turned down a request from his family for his release in May.
Arrested in Serbia in 2011, Mladic saw the conviction against him upheld on appeal in 2021.
Among the crimes attributed to him was the July 1995 massacre of approximately 8,000 Bosnian men and boys in the eastern Srebrenica region, widely described as the worst such atrocity in Europe since WWII.
The Mechanism is tasked with handling the remaining work of the UN tribunals based in The Hague, including the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the court that convicted Mladic.
