The final verdict in the war crimes trial of Ratko Mladic, the top Bosnian Serb wartime commander in the 1991-95 Bosnian war, will be handed down on June 8 in the Hague, the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT) confirmed on Friday.

The International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) had sentenced Mladic in November 2017, in a first-instance verdict, to life imprisonment.

Mladic was the top Bosnian Serb military leader during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and trial judges found that he was responsible for overseeing the murder of more than 8,000 Muslim Bosniak men and boys in the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica in 1995 after the town – declared a UN “safe area” – had been captured by his forces.

ICTY judges had determined that Mladic was responsible for ethnic cleansing campaigns against Bosnian Muslims and Croats, and also for the violence and terror campaign against civilians in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo during his forces’ 43-month siege of the city, as part of a plan to carve out a “Greater Serbia” in the territory of former Yugoslavia.

Mladic was arrested in Serbia and immediately extradited to stand trial in the Hague in May 2011, 16 years after the war had ended. In 2017 he was sentenced to life imprisonment for one count of genocide, five counts of crimes against humanity and four counts of violations of the laws or customs of war, and was cleared of one more count of genocide.

Both the prosecution and defence attorneys had filed appeals to the original verdict.