Lawyers prosecuting Bosnian Serb commander failed to provide documents to defence, causing judge to announce delay

The Hague war crimes tribunal, already under fire for its slow pace in dealing with Balkan war crimes cases, was thrown into confusion on Thursday by the revelation that lawyers prosecuting the Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic had failed to turn over hundreds of thousands of pages of evidence to the defence.

The Dutch judge, Alphons Orie, said the mistake would lead to a delay in the trial, which lawyers were already predicting would last four years or more.

“The chamber is still in the process of gathering information of the scope and full impact of this error,” Orie said.

He added that, after meeting defence and prosecution lawyers, he would announce a new start date for the prosecution’s presentation of evidence and witnesses “as soon as possible”. This phase had been due to start at the end of May.

The fiasco drew outrage from Bosnian survivors and bereaved families who had made the trip to The Hague to see Mladic face trial.

“We don’t agree with this. We ask to speed up the trial and to speed up the judgment, because it is important for the past, for Bosnia and the whole region, and it’s important for the future,” said Hatidza Mehmedovic, whose husband and two sons, one still a teenager, were among over 7,000 men and boys massacred by Mladic’s forces in Srebrenica.

“Nothing more can happen to me, but I don’t want any other mother anywhere to be in my shoes and go looking for the bones of their children, and be happy if they find only small bones,” Mehmedovic said. “With my elder son, they have only found two bones. With my younger they have almost a full skeleton. This has to be a fight for justice so that no mother has to look for their children in mass graves.”

Mladic claims he was in Belgrade holding meetings and attending a wedding when the Srebrenica massacre took place, but the prosecution demonstrated that he was in Srebrenica and the surrounding towns on the critical days from 11-14 July when the Muslim enclave fell to his forces and when men and teenage boys were rounded up and separated from women and children prior to their execution.

“This was not an army out of control or under the control of someone else. Only an army strictly under control from the top could have murdered over 7,000 people in four days,” Peter McCloskey, one of the trial prosecutors, said. “The VRS [the Republika Srpska army] carried out orders with incredible discipline, organisation and military efficiency … It was a truly amazing feat of utter brutality.”

For much of Thursday’s proceedings, Mladic listened impassively to the evidence presented against him. He became animated only once, clapping and giving a thumbs-up sign when a video was shown of him interrogating and shouting at the Dutch UN commander, Thom Karremans, whose troops were supposed to protect the enclave but were hopelessly outnumbered.

Mladic repeatedly asked Karremans if his soldiers had fired on Bosnian Serb troops who had overrun Srebrenica, and demanded to know if Karremans had called in Nato air strikes. Karremans insisted UN soldiers had been ordered to shoot only in self-defence and air strikes were decided by the UN headquarters.

In fact, as McCloskey pointed out, the air strikes were too little, too late.

The tribunal was shown footage of Mladic walking through Srebrenica town on 11 July 1995, just after it had fallen.

In it he says: “We give this town to the Serb people as a gift … Finally the time has come has take our revenge on the Turks [referring to Muslims] in this region.”

The prosecution also showed footage of Mladic on the scene while men and boys were separated from their families. Film was shown of the operation to round up men and boys who had tried to escape through the woods and of piles of corpses outside a nearby warehouse. Other evidence included Mladic’s written order to provide several tonnes of diesel fuel to a Bosnian Serb officer in Zvornik whose job it was to excavate mass graves and rebury the remains of the victims in smaller graves in an effort to avoid detection.

It was unclear how the debacle at The Hague had come about. The prosecution declared in November that it had handed the documentation over and only realised last Friday that it had failed to do so. The defence says a million pages were involved. Prosecutors admit that more than 37,000 documents could be missing.

Mladic’s lawyers are demanding a delay of six months. Tribunal sources suggested the delay would be significantly less than that, particularly in light of previous criticism of the court for its glacial pace. The trial of the former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic lasted five years and only ended with his death from a heart attack in a cell in The Hague in March 2006.

After the morning session, Mehmedovic accused the international community of conniving in continuing “ethnic cleansing”. She pointed to a change in municipal law in Srebrenica this month, accepted by the international community, which meant that Muslim survivors of the massacre could not vote for the mayor. The municipality is now likely to come under Serb control in elections in October.

“What is even worse is that the whole world is seeing this and even now is not doing anything about it. The [ethnic cleansing] project is still alive. People are still suffering. Crimes are being rewarded,” Mehmedovic said. “Families of those who were killed cannot vote. With this law, they are legalising genocide. This is very dangerous for the region. This is what has to be stopped. “

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Hallam was jailed in 2005 for the murder of trainee chef Essayas Kassahun but has always protested his innocence

Sam Hallam, who has served seven years for murder, is to be released from prison after the prosecution told the court it would not oppose his appeal.

In a dramatic moment at the court of appeal on Wednesday, 24-year-old Hallam was told that he would be released. Jailed in 2005 for the murder of Essayas Kassahun, he has always protested his innocence and his family and friends have campaigned fiercely for his release.

The Metropolitan police face criticism for their murder inquiry and were accused in court of failing to disclose evidence and to pursue lines of inquiry.

Supporters and Hallam’s mother, Wendy, wept in court. Outside, scores of friends from north London repeated: “We just can’t believe this.”

Hallam – who was 17 at the time of the offence – was convicted in 2005 of murdering trainee chef Kassahun in Hoxton in October 2004. He was sentenced to life with the recommendation he serve 12 years.

Hallam was convicted on the basis of disputed identification by two witnesses who placed him at the scene of the killing. In his defence, Hallam claimed he was playing football with a friend at the time. He said he knew there was going to be trouble on the night of the killing and had wanted to avoid it.

On Wednesday, Henry Blaxhall QC, for Hallam, told the appeal court that new evidence showed Hallam was not at the murder scene and raised serious doubts about the reliability of the only evidence against him from two witnesses.

Blaxhall labelled the case a “serious miscarriage of justice” and said the combination of police failures to investigate and to disclose evidence, and the unreliability of the witness evidence had combined to put him wrongly in jail.

The appeal was brought after the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) instructed an outside force – Thames Valley – to review the original murder inquiry and pursue new lines of investigation.

Thames Valley police and the CCRC both criticised the original Met police inquiry in documents submitted to the appeal court.

Paul May, who ran the campaign for Hallam’s family, said they had uncovered nine witnesses who said Hallam was not at the scene.

The main evidence against Hallam came from a young girl, Phoebe Henville, who changed her account several times. There was no forensic evidence to link Hallam to the scene and he was of previous good character.

Henville said in cross-examination at the original trial, when pressed as to why she had identified Hallam: “I just wanted someone to blame.”

David Hatton, QC for the prosecution, stood shortly after 2pm to announce the crown would not be defending the appeal. “We have given this anxious consideration for a long time and during today and we are not in a position to oppose the appeal,” he said.

Court of appeal judges are expected formally to quash the murder conviction at noon on Thursday.

Michael Broster, the police officer who led the original murder inquiry, was criticised by May outside court on Wednesday, and by the CCRC and Thames Valley police for his investigation in documents presented to the court.

The same officer was also criticised this month by the coroner in the Gareth Williams inquest.

Hallam’s father committed suicide while his son was in prison. His uncle said: “It’s disgusting. A young girl gave three different accounts of what happened; there was no DNA, nothing; and the police have based their case on that girl.”

Kassahun, 21, had come to the aid of a friend, Louis Colley, who was being attacked on Old Street, in central London, by a mob of youths over a trivial perceived insult.

One of seven charged with the murder, Hallam initially, on the advice of his lawyer, declined to answer police questions, something his supporters claim may have counted against him at the trial.

Another man, Bullabeck Ringblong, was also convicted of the murder and is serving life.

Among the supporters of Hallam outside court on Wednesday was Patrick Maguire, who was wrongly accused over the 1974 Guildford pub bombings. Hallam’s other supporters include the actor Ray Winstone, but the campaign to free him has been driven by friends and members of the community in Hoxton. Penny Millard, a friend, said the community had united to campaign for Hallam.

“They all knew he was innocent. He wasn’t there,” she said. “Today is amazing. It should have happened sooner but the wheels of justice are slow. We can’t believe this.”

Law | guardian.co.uk

A blanket licence for electronic monitoring could slowly strangle private life

A dismal 32% turnout in the local elections flowed from a sense that all politicians are the same. That belief is often wrong, but in respect of civil liberties it was vindicated a few days after the vote. The Queen’s speech proposed secret justice and a licence for electronic snooping. Both wheezes came from a coalition whose founding agreement had said “the British state has become too authoritarian” under New Labour. But both trace back to the fag-end of the Brown era: the surveillance was first proposed in 2009, while securocrats had got to work on secret justice the moment the master of the rolls had shown the audacity to damn the security services’ “dubious record” on torture in early 2010. So far as these two freedom-sapping schemes are concerned, the general election might as well never have happened.

A blanket licence for electronic monitoring could slowly strangle private life. Veiling civil proceedings in secrecy changes the very nature of the courtroom; it warps the judge’s role – from a neutral arbiter on open evidence, to a virtual agent of the executive, required to figure out what hidden materials might mean for people barred from seeing them. These columns have put the detailed arguments before and our purpose here is not rehearsing them again, but to put the question the Queen’s speech invites – who will speak for liberty now?

The obvious candidate ought to be the coalition’s liberal wing. But when the surveillance scheme first re-emerged, Nick Clegg’s instinct was hyping up minor differences with the 2009 proposal and playing down “scare-mongering”. After malcontents in his own ranks raised the temperature, he belatedly secured extra scrutiny and a possible delay, though did not take the care to sort out the detail. Last night the Home Office was unable to say whether the whole bill would now be a draft with legislation postponed, or whether – as Her Majesty’s words suggested – the measure was being shunted onto the slipway with a possibly empty promise of extra “scrutiny” for the contentious clauses.

Secret court hearings should have been even easier to delay, seeing as the responsible minister, Ken Clarke, recently conceded to the joint committee on human rights that he was “unsettled” by points expert lawyers had raised, and that a white paper would need to iron these out. In the event, there will be no white paper but a rushed bill which allows secret evidence wherever a nebulous public interest is satisfied.

When a government goes on a power-grab, it is surely the duty of HM opposition to resist. Labour shows scant sign of that. Indeed, shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper used her Queen’s speech turn to bemoan the modest action taken to bring the overbearing DNA database into compliance with the law. An effective performer on public services and family finances, when it comes to freedom Ms Cooper scarcely bothers to pretend she has a libertarian bone in her body: she raised questions of detail about both proposals but did not raise any question of principle. Her boss Ed Miliband, by contrast, seized the Labour leadership by promising a clean break with New Labour, and when newly enthroned he explained that this meant moving on from policies like ID cards and extended pre-charge detention.

It’s all very well to disown past failed policies. The test is the policies of today. The secret justice proposal is cast from the same ugly mould as 42 days. Less interested in privacy than freedom, and with a rather Fabian benign view of the state, Mr Miliband may not feel an instinctive chill about surveillance, but he also needs to think about what the Americans call the character thing. Having made a strong stand over snooping by News International, he would do well to be equally critical of snooping by the authorities. He promised Labour would change on liberty; 18 months into his leadership we are still to see it.

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Comment is free’s coverage of human rights and civil liberties has been enhanced and updated

When we first launched Comment is free’s Liberty Central site in January 2009, the threats to individual rights and freedoms looked somewhat different. The Labour government was planning to introduce a compulsory identity card, CCTV was a hot issue and councils appeared to enjoy extraordinary powers to monitor people’s activity. On the other hand, some things haven’t changed: Jack Straw was describing parts of the Human Rights Act as a “villains’ charter“, the right to a fair trial was under threat, and there were concerns about the government’s plans to gather individuals’ details on a database.

It’s apt that we’ve revamped Liberty Central shortly after a small but significant piece of legislation, the Protection of Freedoms Act, entered the statute book on 1 May. This assortment of measures was intended to allay fears about DNA retention, CCTV, police and local authority powers and a number of other infringements of individual liberty (including, and very laudably, the right of men convicted of buggery to have their conviction disregarded). But threats to liberty mutate, and preoccupations change. What about the US-UK treaty that has seen British citizens extradited for trial in the US? Does the phone-hacking scandal make the case for a privacy law stronger? Do individuals still have the right to meaningful protest? Is the bill of rights commission a hopelessly divided organisation, or a serious threat to the Human Rights Act? Should we be able to deport someone for trial in a country where the evidence against him may have been obtained through torture – the ultimate sticking point in the ongoing Abu Qatada saga? And why does the government want to hold more hearings in secret?

We’ve covered all these issues on Comment is free, but we felt that “Liberty Central” was no longer the best title under which to organise them. First, the Tea Party movement in the US – not a natural ally for the Guardian – has since appropriated the phrase. Second, there’s a politically charged tension between the terms “human rights” and “civil liberties”. The left, with its (generally) instinctive support for the Human Rights Act, tends to plump for the former; the right, which prefers the language of “responsibilities” and would prefer a bill of rights to the HRA, opts for the latter. Civil liberties are also an important strand of US political debate. Both are key concepts and we’ve tried to acknowledge them in our new title, Human Rights and Liberties.

We’ve updated our links to current legislation and campaigning organisations, added links to the latest news stories, incorporated our multimedia content – most recently a video on the latest developments in the Chen Guangcheng case – and a calendar of forthcoming rights-related events (email maya.wolfe-robinson@guardian.co.uk if you know of one we’ve overlooked). We’re also keeping a special eye on the work of the bill of rights commission. Hope you like the new page – and do follow us on Twitter, where we’ve changed our name to @cifhumanrights.

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