Vlajic: There is no example in the history of Europe of someone being sent to prison for a year because of a statement

Lawyer Nebojsa Vlajic, who represents Ivan Todosijevic, who was sentenced to one year in prison by the Court of Appeal in Pristina for his statement about the events in Racak in January 1999, said that he had learned about the verdict from the Albanian media and that it had not been delivered yet, neither to him nor to his client.

The former president of the municipality of Zvecan and the former minister of administration and local self-government Ivan Todosijevic was sentenced last year by the General Court in Priština, in repeated proceedings, to one year in prison, on the charge of "causing national, racial, religious or ethnic hatred and intolerance", and The Court of Appeal in Pristina rejected the appeal of the defense and confirmed the verdict.

Vlajic told Kosovo Online that the fact that the general public learned about the verdict from the media said a lot.

"The verdict has not been delivered to Todosijevic yet, nor to me as his lawyer, the verdict was distributed through the Albanian press and we all saw it. This also tells to whom this verdict is intended for, and it is intended for the general public and for disciplining and silencing an entire nation, and not to an individual," Vlajic says.

He also assessed that such situations had become an inadmissible judicial practice in Pristina, adding that there was no example in European history of someone being sent to prison for a year for any statement.

"The bigger problem is that this verdict is just as illegal as the first one, but instead of two years, the sentence is one year in prison. It's still draconian. No sentence can be fair if what the defendant did was not a crime. This is not a criminal offense; it falls under the permitted freedom of speech. There is no example in the history of Europe of someone being sent to prison for a year for any statement," Vlajic explains.

Vlajic said that this verdict was a message that people did not have the right to their opinion and stressed that freedom of speech and expression was being destroyed in Kosovo.

"This verdict is a message that you cannot have an opinion about the events of the past, which is absolutely wrong because each of us has the right to think whatever we want, and in addition to having the right to think, he also has the right to say it because freedom of opinion is nothing without freedom of expression, and we see that both rights are violated in Kosovo," Vlajic concluded.

He says that the only possible thing, when it comes to Todosijevic's case, is to submit a request for the protection of legality to the Supreme Court of Kosovo because an appeal against the second-instance verdict is not possible.

Todosijevic was first sentenced in the Court of first instance at the end of 2019 to two years in prison for the statement he made at the commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the NATO bombing in Zvecan when he stated that the Racak case had been fabricated and used as a reason for the bombing.

The first-instance decision was later confirmed by the Court of Appeal in Pristina, but the Supreme Court sent the case back for a retrial.