The UN’s International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals in The Hague on Thursday announced that it had dismissed the request from convicted Bosnian war criminal Ratko Mladić, who is currently serving a life sentence for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, for early provisional release due to an advanced deterioration of his health that could potentially lead to his death.

In coming to her decision, President of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, Graciela Gatti Santana, rejected the submissions from Mr Mladić’s legal counsel who argued that there were compelling and exceptional circumstances in his case that would justify such a measure. After conducting an assessment of the prison hospital and the United Nations Detention Unit (UNDU), President Santana was satisfied that his diagnosis was being adequately managed at the facilities. She also noted that in previous instances where conditional release of prisoners had been granted, they were acute terminal illnesses, whereas Mladić’s diagnosis was a chronic and multifaceted one.

She considered additional arguments that he should be given sufficient possibilities to be with his loved ones before his imminent death and dismissed them, stating that the compassionate course of treatment that he is currently undergoing allowed for visitation from his loved ones. The application, which was first filed on the 23rd of April 2026, was accompanied by two reports of medical professionals who had visited him in detention. However, she found that neither report had shed further light on the picture already available to the Mechanism, thereby reiterating the high legal threshold required for such releases.

Mladić, a former military commander known for his ruthlessness during the Bosnian war and who earned the name ‘Butcher of Bosnia’, was sentenced to life imprisonment by UN tribunals for his role in orchestrating genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity during the 1992-1995 period of the war. Among the extent of his brutality included his genocide of over 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, his command of Sarajevo, which led to the widespread sniping of civilians, and kidnapping UN peacekeepers before using them as human shields against airstrikes.

He had also committed sex crimes such as sexual slavery during the war, using it to inflict ‘conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction’ onto Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats. Mladić, who relied on ultranationalist rhetoric to portray Bosnian Muslims as a threat to the genetic and historical ‘purity’ of the Serb nation, translated this into a military strategy that would ultimately lead to the senseless deaths of over 15,000 individuals and psychological trauma for those who lived through his reign of terror.