Hague court Appeals Chamber releases Blaskic

The Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has rapped one of the court’s main Trial Chambers sharply over the knuckles by overturning 16 of the 19 counts of the Trial Chamber’s earlier conviction of Croatian General Tihomir Blaskic.
July 29, the Appeals Chamber rendered these findings, and reduced Blaskic’s sentence from 45 years to nine years. Since Blaskic has already served eight years and four months, and has been what the court described as a “model prisoner”, he was later in the day released.
The summary that the Appeals Chamber issued of its finding makes clear its view that the Trial Chamber had committed several significant errors of law as well as errors of fact in reaching its earlier judgment. Regarding “fact”, in the four years since the Trial Chamber reached its judgment, substantial new evidence has come to light that has tended to exonerate Blaskic. But the Appeals Chamber made clear that on each of the T.C.’s earlier judgments it had considered errors of law before it even started considering errors of fact; and where the errors of law were on their own substantial enough to lead to overturning the T.C.’s judgment, then the A.C. did not even consider the issues of fact.
It is evidently a good thing, from the rule-of-law viewpoint, that defendants at the international criminal tribunals have access to a well-constituted appeals procedure. However, the fact that the Appeals Chamber can overturn so many of the T.C.’s judgments merely on matters of law, rather than on matters of (newly adduced) fact seems to me fairly troubling. It would be great if the judges at the two different levels could get their acts a bit better together regarding what constitutes sound legal argument on all or most of these cases. And then, just consider what this whole process must have cost: the process of trying Blaskic on all these 19 counts, and then the subsequent process of overturning 16 of those convictions….

I tried to count the number of trial days from ICTY’s website, but they don’t have such a clear case-management information system as ICTR. Anyway, there are transcripts there for Blaskic-related court appearances on 258 different days between April 1996 and October 2003. Say that maybe half of those were for procedural matters; but that’s still 129 court-days… at maybe $50,000 per court-day? $6 million? Has that money really been well used?
…Anyway, on the matters of law that the A.C. raised, there were two points that seemed of interest. One was on the issue of “command responsibility”. In this regard, the A.C. evidently thought the T.C. had cast far too wide a net for the potential applicability of this doctrine:

In the present case, the Trial Chamber in paragraph 474 of the Trial Judgement articulated the following standard and I quote:
Any person who, in ordering an act, knows that there is a risk of crimes being committed and accepts that risk, shows the degree of intention necessary (recklessness) (le dol