Nikolic: If the law is the same for everyone, it must be the same whether your name is Serbian or Svecla

President of the Serbian Parliament’s Committee on Kosovo and Metohija Danijela Nikolic assessed that the judgment against Kosovo’s caretaker Interior Minister Xhelal Svecla demonstrated what she described as differing standards within Kosovo’s judiciary.

Nikolic wrote on X that Svecla had received a one-year suspended sentence for the use of a weapon in the Kosovo Assembly and stressed that, despite the judgment, he remained at liberty, even though, as she claimed, “his act also contains elements of a terrorist act.”

“Why did Kurti’s court ‘pardon’ Svecla? Because the so-called Law on General Elections stipulates that a person who, within the past three years, has been convicted by a final judgment of a criminal offense and sentenced to at least one year of actual imprisonment cannot be certified as a candidate in an election. That is why the question here should be: how could a Serb receive one year of actual imprisonment for possessing a hunting rifle, while in a case involving the use of a weapon, a way is sought or found to avoid the same consequences?” Nikolic asked.

She then compared the case with a judgment recently handed down to a Serb who was sentenced to one year in prison for possessing a hunting rifle which, according to her, he had not even used.

“But this brings us to the heart of the matter, where there apparently are two parallel sets of laws. One is the public one, which we can all read. The other, it seems, is some secret code that is taken out of a drawer only when the defendant is a Serb,” Nikolic said.

According to her, under such a “secret code,” evidence becomes less important.

“It is enough that you are a Serb, and the sentence is already prepared—draconian and tailored to your ‘bloodline’ and ethnic affiliation. For a Serb—a hunting rifle, one year of actual imprisonment. For Svecla and others like him—it appears that the law also has footnotes, discounts and special privileges, because the judiciary then becomes generous, creative and full of understanding,” she wrote.

Nikolic said that “if the law is not equal for everyone, then it is not justice.”

“It is justice administered along ethnic lines—a sentence tailored to one’s bloodline. If the law is the same for everyone, then it must be the same whether your name is Serbian or Svecla. Anything else raises the very serious question of whether the judiciary is being used to send one person to prison while preserving another person’s political future,” Nikolic said.