Grabar Kitarovic wants Seselj sentenced as soon as possible

ZAGREB - Croatia's new president Kolinda Grabar Kitarovic has asked UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to take any action necessary, including calling a meeting of the UN Security Council, to make sure that head of the Serbian Radical Party Vojislav Seselj was taken back into the custody of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and sentenced as soon as possible.

The ICTY raised an indictment against Seselj in February 2003, accusing him of war ctimes and crimes ahainst humanity in 1991/93 in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegobina and the Serbian province of Vojvodina, where no war conflict took place.

Seselj was released from ICTY custody on November 12 last year, without any special requirements, since his health had deteriorated one year after an operation to remove a cancer.

After Seselj made political statements that the SRS is not giving up on a Serbian Vukovar or the Republic of Serb Krajina and will do everything to make it a part of Greater Serbia, Croatia launched a campaign to have him back in the Scheveningen prison.

Seselj spent nearly 12 years in detention without a sentence. His trial was completed in 2010, and the ICTY stated that he would not receive a verdict before the end of 2015.

Grabar Kitarovic said inher letter that was why she wanted Ban and the Security Council to insist that the ICTY deliver a verdict against Seselj without delay and come out with the argumentation for it later on, and she stressed that it was key to ensure that Seselj did avoid being sentenced by dying.

Serbia's Deputy Prime Minister and head of the National Council for Cooperation witht the ICTY Rasim Ljajic noted that Grabar Kitarovic's letter to Ban was a brutal political intereference into the...