BELGRADE, 18.07.2019. – Serbia’s Commissioner for Protection of Equality condemned on Wednesday the “misogyny, sexism and offensive comments about the Danas daily reporter Snezana Congradin by a convicted war criminal Vojislav Seselj, the FoNet news agency reported.
Brankica Jankovic said discriminatory statements, insults and humiliation based on appearance, health condition or other personal characteristis were inadmissible and banned by law.
Mainly, she added, when they came from the lawmakers or other public figures.
Jankovic also condemned insults on a journalist and editor of the kolubarske.rs website and demanded the respective institutions to react promptly. “Such things must be publicly condemned and institutionally sanctioned to stop daily verbal violence” in Serbia.
Seselj, also the leader of the ultra-nationalist Serbian Radical Party (SRS), and a deputy to the Republic Parliament, told the Assembly’s session that the journalist who said that the genocide was committed in Srebrenica should be sentenced to 20 years in prison.
He insulted Congradin because she published a reportage from Potocari, the gave site of Serbrenica’s massacre victims, saying that she was a journalist “in the country which committed the genocide and which hasn’t yet faced it, but instead, the whole society generally is even further from that.”
The Hague Tribunal for war crimes sentenced Seselj to ten-year imprisonment for crimes against humanity, including the inciting of ethnic cleansing in Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia’s province of Vojvodina from August 1991 to September 1993.
He spent more than ten years in custody so he was freed after the sentencing.
Seselj remained an SRS member of the Parliament, and the opposition said it was against the law since he was a convicted war criminal.
Seselj was the party boss to the current President Aleksandar Vucic, who later split with the SRS and together with a majority of Radicals formed now ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS).