Belgrade and Moscow cite international law in every forum open to them. Each reserves the right to say which parts of it are law today.
by Kadri Kryeziu, Publisher | 1 September 2026
On 18 August Ratko Mladić's lawyers asked the Residual Mechanism in The Hague to let him die in Serbia. The medical report before the judge, dated 14 August, said weeks. On 20 August the Mechanism's president, Graciela Gatti Santana, refused, and wrote into her decision that his "human dignity, to which everyone is entitled, is fully respected under the current circumstances." He died on the 27th. His counsel Branko Lukić said that evening how long they had been "begging them to send the man home." The Serbian government had asked more than once as well.
I want to say plainly that there was nothing improper in the request. A man of 84 was dying far from his children and asked to die near them; a state asked on his behalf; a judge weighed it and found his dignity already kept. She may have been wrong. Courts are wrong often enough that anyone who has served on one learns early to keep judicial authority and judicial infallibility in separate rooms. A party who thinks a court decided wrongly has words for that, and a remedy: a motion, an appeal, an argument in public. A party who says, once the court has decided against him, that the court was never entitled to decide at all is saying something else, and that is where everything I have to say about Serbia begins.
On 28 August, at a rally in the Mačva district, Serbia's president said The Hague had "wanted Mladić to die behind bars, not in a hospital," called the refusal "uncivilised behaviour, behaviour without precedent and without justification," and then, unasked: "Do I believe in justice from The Hague? I never have, and I still do not." That same day Nenad Vujić, Belgrade's justice minister, had a team and an aircraft on standby and a contact person inside the Mechanism, waiting for the Mechanism to name the day the body could be collected. A litigant who files a motion has recognised the bench. A litigant who denounces the bench after losing, while waiting for its clerk to call, has not withdrawn that recognition. He has added a speech to it.
The court Aleksandar Vučić never believed in was built by the Security Council with Russia's hand raised. Resolution 827 of 25 May 1993 created the tribunal under Chapter VII of the Charter, fifteen votes to none. Six years later the same Council, under the same chapter, adopted Resolution 1244 on Kosovo, Russia again in favour, and Belgrade has cited it since 10 June 1999 as binding on the world. Article 25 of the Charter joins the two texts in one sentence: members "agree to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council." Serbia has carried that obligation since the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia entered the United Nations in November 2000. It then did what a state does when it means an obligation. It legislated it, in the Law on Cooperation with the Hague Tribunal of April 2002, and it performed it, on 31 May 2011, when a Serbian government put Mladić on the aircraft five days after Serbian police found him in Lazarevo. Snežana Malović, the justice minister of the day, announced that "Serbia has fulfilled its international and moral obligation."
Recognition of a court is a matter of conduct, and the conduct is on file. A state that arrested a man for a court, transferred him to it, argued before it and cites its parent body as scripture has recognised the court. What remains open to rejection is the finding.
Set the record out and the selections line up. Chapter VII is binding authority when the number is 1244. When the same authority produced 827 and the tribunal that followed from it, Belgrade finds the authority has limits it never had before. The International Court of Justice is authority in Belgrade for its 2007 judgment, which held that the acts of the Bosnian Serb army could not be attributed to Serbia, so that Serbia had neither committed genocide at Srebrenica nor been complicit in it. The same judgment found Serbia in breach of its duty to prevent that genocide and of its duty to punish it, for failing to hand over Ratko Mladić. The first half is quoted; the second half has never been read aloud in Belgrade. The court's 2010 advisory opinion, that Kosovo's declaration of independence broke no rule of international law, was dismissed the afternoon it was delivered. The Hague itself is divided in two by verdict: the Mechanism that convicted Mladić never delivered justice, while the Specialist Chambers across town are trusted enough for Serbia's president to preview a verdict on Hashim Thaçi, due 16 September, that he expects to be "mostly acquitting."
Moscow orders from the same menu, and has done so for longer. Russia voted for 827 in 1993 and abstained rather than oppose the 2010 resolution that created the Mechanism. On 8 July 2015 it vetoed the British draft condemning the Srebrenica genocide, at the written request of Serbia's then president, Tomislav Nikolić, who greeted the veto as "a great day for Serbia" in which "the smearing of the entire Serbian people has been prevented." On 27 August 2026 the Russian foreign ministry called the Mechanism's refusals "cannibalistic decisions" (людоедские решения). Russia raised its hand to create the court, blocked the Council from naming the crime the court had convicted, and mourned the convict.
States break international law. That is as old as the law and the law was written knowing it. What Belgrade and Moscow practise is a different thing, and it needs its own name, because the state that simply breaks a rule at least leaves the rule standing. The à la carte state keeps the whole system and reserves to itself the decision of which parts of it are in force this week. Serbia does not merely find 1244 useful; it insists the resolution binds every other state on earth. It does not merely dislike the 2010 opinion; it treats the opinion as never having been given. Russia's vote for 827 is history; its veto against the Council's condemnation of the Srebrenica genocide is policy; and the tribunal created by that vote is denounced for delivering the judgment that veto refused to name. The selection changes with the season. The claim to be acting under international law does not.
I spent six years on a constitutional bench. Nothing that happened there taught me much about a judgment that gave a government what it wanted; those are signed and forgotten by dinner. The judgments that mattered were the ones that went against the government of the day, because the day after, the state either carried them out or it did not, and its answer told you what kind of state it was. A state governed by law keeps a set of responses available to it when a court disappoints it. It can appeal. It can criticise. It can file again, as Serbia did in August. It can seek to amend the law where amendment is lawful. The one response it does not have is to keep the court for the rulings it likes and dissolve it for the ruling it does not, because the authority of a court is tested in exactly one place, and that place is the judgment you did not want. Belgrade and Moscow want the authority of international law in every forum where that authority serves them. What both decline is the discipline that gives the authority its meaning: a rule does not stop being law because it produced the answer you did not want.
Mladić told the tribunal in 2014, "I do not recognise this court." He was a defendant and could say so; his position, whatever else one thinks of it, was whole. His state's is not. It wrote a law binding itself to the court, arrested him for it, transferred him to it, petitioned it while he was dying and waits on it now that he is dead. It accepted everything about the institution except what the institution finally said about Ratko Mladić. The defendant refused the court. Serbia refused only the verdict.
Prof. Kadri Kryeziu is a constitutional law expert and co-drafter of the Constitution of the Republic of Kosovo. He served as First Vice President of Kosovo’s Constitutional Court (2009–2015) and is the publisher of The Kosovo Dispatch
