President of the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) Theodor Meron refused the request submitted by Ratko Mladic aksing that presiding judge Alfonso Ori should be exempt and that the beginning of the trial which has been scheduled for Wednesday should be postponed.

Mladic's defence team called on the ICTY president on Friday to exempt judge Ori, accusing him of partiality because he was the judge in several other cases in which former Mladic's associates were sentenced and because as a Dutch citizen, he is biased when it comes to charges for the Srebrenica crimes in 1995.

Mladic's lawyers filed requests on several occasions asking for the postponement of the trial, and they also did so on Monday, when they asked for postponement of the trial for six months.

The defence team believes that they were denied timely access to a more extensive documentation, including the papers which are essential for the trial.

The indictment against Mladic contains 11 points, including those for genocide, crimes against humanity and violation of laws and traditions of warfare in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) from 1992 to 1995.

After several years spent in hiding, Mladic was arrested in the village of Lazarevo near Zrenjanin, north-eastern Serbia, on May 26, 2011, and he was extradited to the ICTY on May 31.