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Nationalist politician Vojislav Seselj asked the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague on Tuesday to grant him the right to appeal against its final verdict under which he was sentenced to ten years in prison for inciting and committing the persecution of Croats in the village of Hrtkovci in Serbia’s Vojvodina region in 1992.
Seselj argued that the right to appeal against a verdict of conviction was “an elementary right” which must not be denied to anyone.
“The verdict passed down by the Mechanism constitutes a legal precedent… It is inconceivable that a person found guilty and sentenced for a crime has no right to appeal such a decision,” he said.
He argued that April’s final verdict should actually be considered a first-instance decision because he was originally acquitted of the charges in his first-instance trial.
Final verdicts at the UN court cannot be appealed.
The UN court ruled in its final verdict in April this year that in a speech he made in Hrtkovci in May 1992, Seselj incited the persecution, deportation and forcible transfer of Croats from Serbia.
According to the final verdict, with his speech Seselj also “committed” the persecution of Croats by “violating their right to security”.
Judge Theodor Meron quoted a part of Seselj’s speech in which he said that “Croats have no place in Hrtkovci”.
Meron further quoted Seselj as saying that he was “convinced that Serbs from Hrtkovci would soon get rid of the remaining Croats”; that “we will chase Croats away to the Serbian state’s border and from there, they can continue on foot unless they have already left on their own”, and that Croats “have no place to come back to”.
