The men, former Bosnian Serb soldiers and one former member of the Croat Defence Council, were given sentences ranging from 14 to 33 years in prison. They were released after the Bosnian Constitutional Court granted their appeals.
They appealed because the State Court retroactively applied the 2003 penal code when sentencing them, which practice was recently contested by the European Court of Human Rights in the appeals of two Bosnians convicted of war crimes.
The European Court ruled that no one could be found guilty of a crime that did not constitute a crime at the time of commission under national or international law, and that a sentence must not be harsher that those applied when the crime was committed.
Under the penal code of the former Yugoslavia, sentences for war crimes committed during the war on Bosnian territory were twice as mild as those under the Bosnian penal code. The Bosnian State Court, instead of applying the milder law, was applying the far more stricter penal code passed in 2003.