Judge O-Gon Kwon of South Korea has been appointed presiding judge in the forthcoming war crimes trial of former rebel Croatian Serb leader Goran Hadzic, who could be extradited to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) as early as Friday.
The ICTY on Thursday also appointed three members of the Trial Chamber II - judges Burton Hall of the Bahamas, Guy Delvoie of Belgium and Antoine Kesia-Mbe Mindua of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Hadzic, a Croatian Serb wartime leader, is indicted for crimes against humanity during the 1991-95 Croatian war.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) indicted the former president of the self-styled Serb republic of Krajina in Croatia in July 2004 on 14 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity during the 1991-95 conflict.
He is charged with a number of crimes committed in eastern Slavonia, including murder and persecution of the Croat and non-Serb civilian population, prolonged imprisonment of civilians in detention facilities where torture, beatings and killing were not uncommon, forcible transfer of tens of thousands of non-Serbs from across the area under his control to make it part of a new Serb-dominated state.
Hadzic, 52, is also indicted for a massacre at the Ovcara farm outside Vukovar, where 250 Croats taken from the town hospital were executed in 1991.
