A Serbian warlord has appeared in a Manchester court and won the right to have his high-security prison status reconsidered.

Radislav Krstic, 62, was convicted for his involvement the worst massacre in Europe since the Second World War and is serving a 35-year jail sentence.

The former Serb general was a key figure in the murder of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica during the Yugoslav civil war 15 years ago.

Arrested in 1998 by the SAS and American Navy SEALS, he was jailed for aiding and abetting genocide in 2004. Later that year he was transferred to Britain in an agreement between the government and the UN.

In October, he failed in a bid to be downgraded from the strict Category A prison regime he has been on since 2004, when he first moved to a British jail.

Now, a High Court judge sitting at Manchester Civil Justice Centre has ruled that the decision to keep Krstic’s Category A status should be quashed.

Category A is reserved for those prisoners whose escape would be highly dangerous to the public or the security of the state. Inmates have their movements inside jail and communications with the outside world closely monitored, are routinely strip-searched, and have virtually no chance of parole.

Judge Mark Pelling QC’s ruling means that the Category A Review Team at the Ministry of Justice have until October 29 to reconsider Krstic’s prison status. They must also pay the war criminal’s legal bill.

The ruling came after Manchester barrister Pete Weatherby, an expert in human rights, took up the case.

Refusing Krstic’s application in 2009, the authorities said they doubted Krstic ‘fully acknowledged responsibility’ for his actions. They claimed he would 'pose a high level of potential risk’ if he escaped.

They also said that his health problems – he has had a leg amputated – did not mean he would find escape impossible in less secure conditions. In May, Krstic suffered life-threatening injury after his neck was slashed at Wakefield Prison.

But in the judicial review hearing at Manchester, Mr Weatherby argued that the Minstry of Justice’s decision was ‘irrational’.

He said while Krstic’s offending was ‘heinous’, it was ‘situational and short-lived’, happening in the context of a foreign ethnic war which has since finished.

Judge Pelling said that it was accepted that Krstic had been ‘convicted of very serious criminal activity which involved active assistance in the imposition of unimaginable and indescribable suffering on the Bosnian Muslim population of Srebenica’.

But he said the review team had failed to consider Krstic’s case for being downgraded with the ‘necessary degree of scrutiny’, and had ‘failed to look beyond the gravity of the offence’ for which he was sentenced.

Mr Weatherby, of Garden Court North Chambers, previously led the campaign to free Liverpool fan Michael Shields, who was convicted of assault and jailed in Bulgaria before receiving an official pardon.

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