Prosecutors on Tuesday urged UN war crimes judges to impose a 40-year jail term on a former Bosnian Croat leader, denouncing his initial 25-year sentence as inadequate for the "massive" crimes in the Bosnian war.
In imposing its original sentence on Jadranko Prlic in 2013, "the chamber abused its discretion," prosecutor Barbara Goy told the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
"The crimes were massive in scale," she said, recalling how "tens of thousands of Muslims were evicted from their homes... thousands were arrested and detained in awful conditions" during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war.
"Muslims were killed during attacks or when forced to work on the front-lines. They were raped, they were sexually assaulted. Muslim houses and mosques were destroyed," she said.
In an appeal launched last week at the tribunal based in The Hague, Prlic, who denied all the charges, is seeking to overturn the 25-year jail term.
It was imposed after he was convicted of murdering and deporting Muslims during the conflict, which killed more than 100,000 people and left 2.2 million displaced, and which erupted as part of the wars which tore the Balkans apart.
His five co-defendants in the case have also been sentenced to terms of 10 to 20 years in prison -- which Goy slammed as "unreasonable."
She also called for 40 years in prison for three of the men: former defence minister Bruno Stojic, and senior military officials Slobodan Praljak and Milivoj Petkovic.
They all "played key roles in the joint criminal enterprise to create Croat domination," Goy said.
Defence lawyer Michael Karnavas said the prosecution's appeal was "ludicrous" as "we do not accept the notion that Dr Prlic was... involved in any capacity through any of those events."
The appeals court is due to deliver its sentence in November as the ICTY winds down more than 20 years after it was set up to prosecute the worst crimes of the Balkans wars.
It has said that the Prlic case is "one of the tribunal's largest and most complicated." A total of 326 witnesses took the stand during a trial which opened in 2006. The first sentencing ran to more than 2,600 pages.
The ICTY is also due to be deliver in November a highly anticipated sentence in the case of former Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladic, the last person still on trial at the court.
The UN has set up another tribunal to deal with any cases not completely ended at the ICTY.
