Brammertz Urges Serbia to Be Responsible to Hague Tribunal

Aleksandar Vucic and Serge Brammertz

Serge Brammertz, chief prosecutor of the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals, directed attention to the Seselj case in an April 21 talk with Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and his contempt of court case, asking Serbia to be responsible when with regard to this issue, the Serbian president's office said in a press release.

The Hague tribunal has summoned Serbian Radical Party leader Vojislav Seselj for questioning due to contempt of court after he outed protected witnesses in his books, but Seselj declined late in September 2022 to be questioned at the Special Court in Belgrade stating that the Hague prosecution would not permit his legal counsel Vjerica Radeta to be present. The Hague court wants Serbia to extradite Radeta and Petar Jojic, Radical party officials charged with contempt of court in 2012 for allegedly exerting influence on witnesses of the prosecution in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia's proceedings against Seselj.

According to a press release, Brammertz and Vucic also discussed continued cooperation between the Mechanism and Serbia, regional cooperation in processing war crimes and finding missing persons. Vucic stressed that Serbia was consistently seeking justice for war crimes and finding persons who went missing during the armed conflicts of the 1990s.