At first blush it is hard to have much sympathy for former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic’s latest compliant this week that the international court hearing 11 charges against him in The Hague is denying him a fair trial. After all this was also the gripe of that other infamous character of the tragedy of the 1992-95 Balkans conflict, Slobodan Milosevic.

But Karadzic’s plea to be allowed more time to prepare his defence against what are the most serious of charges and that include two counts of genocide, is in fact an entirely legitimate one. And the conduct of those prosecuting Karadzic and the presiding judges has to date smacked of their wanting to get the show on the road so they can swiftly deal with this defendant at the expense of fundamental principle of fairness.

At the heart of Karadzic’s complaint is that while he has been held in custody for 14 months, prosecutors took until May this year to serve on him a staggering 1.3 million pages of evidence. In essence then he has been expected to read, analyse, determine whether or not to object to the admission of any one of these pages between then and late October when the court wanted to start his trial.

Even allowing for the fact that Karadzic is being a little too cute in claiming to be self-represented because he does have a team of legal advisers behind him, it is patently unfair to demand that any defendant in any circumstances be given only five months to thoroughly prepare a rebuttal or explanation of that volume of evidence.

We would not in Australia, or in just about any other democracy, tolerate such a course of conduct on the part of prosecutors and courts, so why the silence on the part of those nations who are funding the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia about its repressive request of Karadzic?

Karadzic’s arguments to the court about the matter of time to prepare have been perfectly reasonable. When presiding judge O-Gon Kwon warned him recently that if he does not attend court hearings the court will appoint a defence counsel for him, Karadzic replied: “I don’t need other people, I just need time. It would be cheapest and easiest, with fewest problems, to give me more time to prepare.”

So far, judge O-Gon Kwon is immovable and the chief prosecutor Serge Brammertz says that Karadzic has had ample time to prepare his defence — 14 years to be exact. This statement should be taken with more than a grain of salt because prosecutors, with the vast armory of the taxpayer-funded lawyers and investigators behind them, forget that they are Goliath and the defendant is more often than not David. And let’s not forget that the charges and final brief against Karadzic were only assembled and served on him this year.

Christoph Safferling, the director of the research and documentation centre at the Philipps University in Marburg, Germany, told Deutsche Welle on October 26 that it is “absolutely essential that there is a proper trial against Karadzic”.

He is right, particularly given that if found guilty on any one or more of the charges against him, Karadzic will face the rest of his life behind bars. At the moment Karadzic is being railroaded by a process that looks less like a fair trial than a manipulated procedure obsessed with a rapid conviction.