Perisic's first court appearance, at which he will enter his plea, has not been scheduled yet.
The Hague tribunal has charged Perisic, 61, with 13 counts of persecution on political, religious and racial grounds, extermination, murder, inhumane acts, and attacks on civilians as crimes against humanity and violations of the laws and customs of war.
The indictment against him refers to the period from 26 August 1993 to 24 November 1998, when Perisic was the then Yugoslavia's military chief of staff.
He has been indicted on the basis of individual and command responsibility due to the role officers of the VJ General Staff, serving in the troops of Bosnian and Croatian Serbs, had in the siege and shelling of Sarajevo from 1993 to 1995, the May 1995 shelling of Zagreb, and the 1995 slaughter of Bosnian Muslims in the UN safe haven Srebrenica.
According to the indictment, Perisic, as the most senior officer in the Yugoslav Army having overall authority and responsibility of its functioning, planned, instigated, ordered, committed, or otherwise aided and abetted in the planning, preparation, or execution of the crimes he has been accused of.
The indictment finds the key of Perisic's accountability for the war crimes Bosnian Serb troops committed against civilians in Sarajevo and Srebrenica, and those which Croatian Serb rebels committed in Zagreb, lies in the fact that the commanders of the Bosnian Serb Army and of the Croatian Serb rebels were VJ officers serving there.
The indictment states that Bosnian Serb army officers, with General Ratko Mladic at the helm, were members of the "30th Personnel Centre of the VJ General Staff," while Milan Celeketic and other Bosnian Serb army officers were members of the "40th Personnel Centre of the VJ".
It has been proved during other trials before the Hague tribunal, notably at that of Slobodan Milosevic, that throughout the 1990s wars, Serbian officers on duty in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina were paid, promoted, decorated and instructed from Belgrade.
In 1996, the county court in Croatia's central coastal city of Zadar sentenced Perisic in absentia to 20 years' imprisonment for war crimes against civilians committed in the shelling of Zadar in 1991.