UN Court Urges Serbia to Send Wanted Nationalists to Hague

Serbia should arrest wanted Serbian Radical Party politicians Petar Jojic and Vjerica Radeta as soon as possible and transfer them to The Hague to face charges, judge Liu Daqun of the International Residual Mechanism Criminal Tribunals said in a ruling on Tuesday.

Daqun's ruling called on Serbia to "execute the arrest warrants and related transfer orders against the accused in order to enable their transfer to the seat of the Mechanism in The Hague without further delay".

Jojic and Radeta, both former Serbian MPs, are charged with contempt of the Hague court during their party leader Vojislav Seselj's trial. They are accused of threatening, blackmailing and bribing witnesses to either change their testimonies or to not testify at all.

Seselj was convicted of wartime crimes in April 2018 and sentenced to ten years in prison, but is not serving any jail time because of the years he spent in custody prior to sentencing.

The Serbian authorities have been locked in a dispute with the UN court for several years over the arrest and extradition of the two Radical Party politicians.

The court initially submitted a warrant ordering their arrest in January 2015.

But in May 2016, Belgrade Higher Court ruled that there were no legal grounds for extraditing the Radicals because Serbia's Law on Cooperation with the Hague Tribunal obliged Belgrade to extradite people charged with war crimes, but not those charged with contempt of court.

In October 2016, the UN court issued an international warrant for the arrest of Jojic and Radeta, saying that Serbia had refused several times to act on its order to arrest and extradite them.

The UN court also reported Serbia to the UN Security Council several times for non-cooperation in...

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