Karadzic attends UN court hearing

A lawyer has been appointed to act on behalf of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic (AP)

Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has appeared at his UN war crimes trial for the first time since the case began.

The man accused of orchestrating the murders of thousands of innocent civilians immediately claimed his "fundamental rights have been violated" by UN judges who started his genocide trial without him.

Karadzic had boycotted the first three days of the trial and on Tuesday again insisted that he needed more time to prepare.

"I do not want to boycott these proceedings, but I cannot take part in something that has been bad from the start and where my fundamental rights have been violated," Karadzic said.

Karadzic faces 11 charges, two counts of genocide and nine other crimes against humanity and war crimes from the 1992-1995 Bosnian war. He has refused to enter pleas, but insists he is innocent of all charges.

The prosecution's two-day opening statement at the hearing in The Hague portrayed Karadzic as the supreme commander of a brutal campaign to ethnically cleanse Muslims and Croats from Bosnian Serb claimed territory. The campaign included the deadly 44-month siege of the capital, Sarajevo, and culminated in the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the eastern enclave of Srebrenica.

Prosecutor Hildegard Uertz-Retzlaff urged judges to impose a court-appointed lawyer on Karadzic so that the case can continue even if he continues his boycott. "Mr. Karadzic cannot be allowed to manipulate the proceedings through his decision to not attend hearings," she said.

Karadzic claims he has not had enough time to prepare his defence even though he was indicted in 1995 and has been in custody for 14 months. "The situation is such that I would really be a criminal if I were to accept these conditions - to enter a trial for which I am not prepared," he said.

Karadzic said prosecutors have loaded him down with 1.3 million pages of evidence and that he only has been able to work on his defence since May, when he got all the evidence from prosecutors.

But Presiding Judge O-Gon Kwon said Karadzic was repeating claims he has made in pre-trial hearings and in motions that have been rejected by trial and appeal judges. He signalled the court is unlikely to grant him any more time. "At the end of the day, I again remind you that it is in your best interest to attend and participate fully in the trial so that justice can be done," he said.