In Serbia, Incitement to Ethnic Hate Rarely Reaches Court

He told one of the women he would "burn" her. And to the other, "I will strangle you". Their crime? Working in a bakery in the northern Serbian town of Novi Sad that is run by Albanians, or as the man called them, "Shiptars", a derogatory term used by some Serbs for Albanians.

It was May 19, 2017. After the man grabbed for the neck of one of the women, she and her colleague escaped into the back, as their assailant chanted words that can be heard on the stands of Serbia's football stadiums - "Kill, slaughter, so the Shiptar does not exist."

Five months later, having pleaded guilty, the man was sentenced to 10 months house arrest with electronic surveillance. He was the drunk, the verdict noted.

The man, who according to court records was born in 1970, was one of 24 people convicted in the past five years in Serbia for incitement to national, racial and religious hatred and intolerance or racial and other discrimination, according to data obtained by BIRN.

Rights groups say this number is in no way representative of the extent of the problem in Serbia, where such language can regularly be heard on the terraces of sports stadiums, at right-wing protests, and even in political and public discourse. It simply isn't being prosecuted, they argue.

"The key problem is that, as in other cases, the prosecution does not act independently but in many cases is dependent on the actions of the police and under great political pressure," said Marko Milosavljevic, programme coordinator at the Youth Initiative for Human Rights, YIHR.

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