Serbian far-right leader Vojislav Seselj was sentenced on April 11 to 10 years in prison for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the civil war caused by the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. 

Seselj found guilty of committing war crimes against Croats and Muslims in Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, and the Serbian province of Vojvodina in 1991-1993. However, he will not return to prison as he has already served the sentence during the lengthy trial.

“Seselj’s sentence has been served in view of the credit which shall be given for his detention in the custody of the ICTY [International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia] pending trial from February 14, 2003 to November 6, 2014,” the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (MICT) announced on April 11 after the ruling by its appeal chamber. 

The MICT partially overturned a 2016 decision by the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague to acquit Seselj of war crimes. The UN court’s judgement was later appealed by the ICTY’s prosecution office the judgment. 

Reacting to the latest court’s decision, Seselj said he will file a request for a review of the final verdict. 

He was typically provocative in comments to N1 after the verdict was delivered, telling the broadcaster that he would have done all the crimes he was charged for if he had had a chance.

“I am very proud of all the war crimes and crimes against humanity they put on me and I’m ready to repeat them multiple [times] in the future,” Seselj said.

Seselj, who has a phd in law, voluntarily went to The Hague in 2003, and defended himself during the trial. He returned to Serbia after being released from ICTY custody, and made a loud comeback to the political scene, attracting attention with deliberately provocative actions. 

Thanks to his return, his Serbian Radical Party (SRS) managed to get back into parliament in the 2016 parliamentary elections, after failing to pass the 5% threshold in 2014. Seselj is frequently quoted in local media, where he aggressively calls for abandoning Serbia’s EU accession process, getting close to Russia and joining the military alliance led by Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO).

Seselj was one of Serbia’s most popular politicians in the early 1990s, thanks to his promotion of “traditional Serbian values” and the idea of “Greater Serbia” which stipulated that all Serbs in Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia and Macedonia should live in a single state. As well as serving in the civil war in Bosnia and Croatia, he also recruited fighters to the Serb side.

Seselj formed the SRS in 1991 together with a group of nationalists. The SRS joined the government alongside the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) led by Slobodan Milosevic, who also stood trial in The Hague but died in 2006 before his verdict was announced.

The SRS has been in opposition since Serbia’s first democratic government took office in 2000.