The former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadic is appealing his conviction and 40 year sentence for genocide and war crimes. He is claiming that his trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague was political. His conviction in March 2016 was therefore wrong.

The ICTY was wound up last year following the conviction of Karadic’s military henchman Ratko Mladic, who was also jailed for 40 years. Karadic’s appeal is being heard by the UN’s Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (MICT), also in The Hague.

Karadic was found guilty on ten of 11 counts of genocide and war crimes, in particular of planning the murder of almost 8,000 Muslim males, men and boys in Srebrenica in July 1995. This slaughter, the worst in Europe since the Second World War atrocities of Hitler’s Nazis, was carried out by the butcher Mladic after he had forced a small Dutch force of UN peacekeepers to surrender and hand over the “safe area” they were supposed to be protecting.

Karadic was also convicted of organizing the three-year siege of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo in which ten thousand civilians died from Serb artillery rounds and snipers bullets fired from the surrounding hills. This bloodbath took place under the complacent gaze of the outside world. Indeed it was only after the humiliation and cowardly surrender of the Dutch troops at Sarajevo, with the appalling consequences for the civilians sheltering under their protection, that the international community finally began to act decisively against Karadic and his creatures in the Bosnian-Serb statelet of Republika Srpska.

The idea that Karadic should believe that he was brought to trial for political reasons beggars belief. He is an educated man. Though he was driven by race hate, just like his Nazi predecessors, he must have known that genocide, the mass slaughter of people purely because of who they were and because they lived in territory that he wanted for Serbs, was morally repugnant and completely indefensible.

On one level, it is not surprising that Karadic should seek to exploit the legal process in The Hague to its very limit. At the moment he is 72 years old and is looking to spend the rest of his days in prison. He will grasp at any chance to escape.

But on another level, that this man should be seeking to overturn the guilty verdicts against him is shocking and depressing. How is it that he cannot see that events in which he played such an overwhelmingly significant part are disgusting crimes? The post-war Nuremberg trials of the surviving Nazi leadership, and later of the men they sent to shoot, gas and work to death their millions of victims, were supposed to draw a line under the savage bigotry that had descended upon a supposedly civilized Europe.

Karadic oversaw the perpetration of egregious horrors that shocked a self-satisfied European Union into the realization that the towering monster of race hate and holocaust had not been slain after all. Only one of the convicted Nazi leaders, Albert Speer admitted his crimes and was spared the hangman’s noose. Karadic has no such honesty but will protest his innocence to the end. That end will be in a comfortable Dutch prison cell. Perhaps unfortunately, there is no gallows waiting for him.