Former Bosnian Croat political leader Jadranko Prlic, who has been sentenced to 25 years in prison for war crimes, meets the requirements to be released on parole as of Tuesday having served half of his sentence, a UN court in The Hague said on Monday.

Prlic, the wartime premier of Herceg-Bosna, the self-styled Croat statelet in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the country’s 1992-1995 war, has been serving his prison term on the British Isle of Wight since last year. Before that, he had been held in the detention centre of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.

In November 2019, the British prison authorities notified the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (MICT), a legal successor to the ICTY, that Prlic will have served half of his sentence on 18 February 2020 and will thus be eligible for parole under British law.

The British authorities said in a letter that a final decision rests with the MICT president, judge Carmel Agius, who presided over the appeals chamber that in 2017 sentenced Prlic and five other senior Herceg-Bosna political and military officials to a total of 111 years in prison for their roles in a joint criminal enterprise the aim of which was to ethnically cleanse areas under Bosnian Croat control and annex them to Croatia.