tovaris
April 1st, 2016, 12:43 PM
Former Serbian deputy PM was charged by ICTY with crimes against humanity and war crimes in Croatia and Bosnia in 1990s
http://www.theguardian.com/law/2016/mar/31/serb-nationalist-vojislav-seselj-acquitted-war-crimes-crimes-against-humanity-icty-the-hague#img-1
Serb ultranationalist Vojislav Šešelj has been acquitted of all nine charges of committing atrocities by the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
The former deputy prime minister of Serbia, 61, who is being treated for cancer, had been accused of recruiting and arming the Serb paramilitaries blamed for carrying out war crimes in Bosnia and Croatia during the early 1990s.
The ruling comes less than a week after the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić was sentenced to 40 years in prison after being found guilty of genocide over the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica. Šešelj, however, was found to have had no military “hierarchical responsibility” for the volunteers that he encouraged to join the Serb army.
Croatia on Thursday banned Šešelj from entering the country after prime minister Tihomir Orešković labelled the verdict “shameful” during a visit to Vukovar, scene of some of the alleged atrocities, where he laid wreaths in memory of war dead.
Šešelj was not at the courtroom in The Hague to hear the verdict. He had repeatedly refused to cooperate with the tribunal, staging a hunger strike, refusing to enter a plea and declining to present a defence. He had been allowed to return to Serbia because of his deteriorating health.
Prosecutors had charged Šešelj, who founded the Serbian Radical party, with three counts of crimes against humanity and six counts of war crimes. The accusations included that he incited torture, murder, forcible deportations and persecution on religious and racial grounds.
Šešelj was alleged to have propagated an inflammatory policy of uniting “all Serbian lands” in a homogeneous Serbian state, which he referred to as greater Serbia.
But the ICTY judgment said the prosecution’s case had been full of “confusion” and that “a lot of the evidence shows that [his] collaboration was aimed at defending the Serbs and the traditionally Serb territories or at preserving Yugoslavia, not at committing the alleged crimes”.
In the majority ruling, the ICTY’s presiding judge, Jean-Claude Antonetti, said: “One of the key findings of the [court] was to note that while Vojislav Šešelj may have had a certain amount of moral authority over his party’s volunteers, they were not his subordinates when they were engaged in military operations.
/.../ (http://www.theguardian.com/law/2016/mar/31/serb-nationalist-vojislav-seselj-acquitted-war-crimes-crimes-against-humanity-icty-the-hague)
Full article:
http://www.theguardian.com/law/2016/mar/31/serb-nationalist-vojislav-seselj-acquitted-war-crimes-crimes-against-humanity-icty-the-hague
More:
http://www.b92.net/eng/news/crimes.php?yyyy=2016&mm=03&dd=31&nav_id=97541
http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/reuters/u-n--tribunal-acquits-serbian-firebrand-seselj-of-war-crimes/42057828
http://www.theguardian.com/law/2016/mar/31/serb-nationalist-vojislav-seselj-acquitted-war-crimes-crimes-against-humanity-icty-the-hague#img-1
Serb ultranationalist Vojislav Šešelj has been acquitted of all nine charges of committing atrocities by the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
The former deputy prime minister of Serbia, 61, who is being treated for cancer, had been accused of recruiting and arming the Serb paramilitaries blamed for carrying out war crimes in Bosnia and Croatia during the early 1990s.
The ruling comes less than a week after the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić was sentenced to 40 years in prison after being found guilty of genocide over the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica. Šešelj, however, was found to have had no military “hierarchical responsibility” for the volunteers that he encouraged to join the Serb army.
Croatia on Thursday banned Šešelj from entering the country after prime minister Tihomir Orešković labelled the verdict “shameful” during a visit to Vukovar, scene of some of the alleged atrocities, where he laid wreaths in memory of war dead.
Šešelj was not at the courtroom in The Hague to hear the verdict. He had repeatedly refused to cooperate with the tribunal, staging a hunger strike, refusing to enter a plea and declining to present a defence. He had been allowed to return to Serbia because of his deteriorating health.
Prosecutors had charged Šešelj, who founded the Serbian Radical party, with three counts of crimes against humanity and six counts of war crimes. The accusations included that he incited torture, murder, forcible deportations and persecution on religious and racial grounds.
Šešelj was alleged to have propagated an inflammatory policy of uniting “all Serbian lands” in a homogeneous Serbian state, which he referred to as greater Serbia.
But the ICTY judgment said the prosecution’s case had been full of “confusion” and that “a lot of the evidence shows that [his] collaboration was aimed at defending the Serbs and the traditionally Serb territories or at preserving Yugoslavia, not at committing the alleged crimes”.
In the majority ruling, the ICTY’s presiding judge, Jean-Claude Antonetti, said: “One of the key findings of the [court] was to note that while Vojislav Šešelj may have had a certain amount of moral authority over his party’s volunteers, they were not his subordinates when they were engaged in military operations.
/.../ (http://www.theguardian.com/law/2016/mar/31/serb-nationalist-vojislav-seselj-acquitted-war-crimes-crimes-against-humanity-icty-the-hague)
Full article:
http://www.theguardian.com/law/2016/mar/31/serb-nationalist-vojislav-seselj-acquitted-war-crimes-crimes-against-humanity-icty-the-hague
More:
http://www.b92.net/eng/news/crimes.php?yyyy=2016&mm=03&dd=31&nav_id=97541
http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/reuters/u-n--tribunal-acquits-serbian-firebrand-seselj-of-war-crimes/42057828