Croatia: Glavas in hate speech campaign

Croatia: Glavas in hate speech campaign

ZAGREB -- Branimir Glavas, who has recently been released from prison, has paid to promote "a campaign of hate speech" on Facebook.

Glavas was convicted for war crimes committed against Serb civilians in Croatia in the early 1990s and was serving his sentence in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The ruling was final, and also confirmed in Bosnia, where he fled shortly before the verdict was passed in May 2009.

The Croatian Constitutional Court, however, recently overturned

the judgment of the country's Supreme Court, and ordered it to reopen the proceedings that previously upheld the ruling of the Zagreb County Court.

According to the Croatian index.hr website, Glavas, who has returned to Croatia, is now using his official Facebook page, managed by his son Filip Glavas, to conduct a campaign against Croatian MP Milorad Pupovac - an ethnic Serb who heads the Serb National Council in that country.

Along a picture showing Pupovac, Glavas posted this message:

"Look at this snout, and always bear in mind how his hatred towards the Croat kind and the state of Croatia is a unit of measurement of evil and a criminal policy toward one's own homeland."

This post also showed up for those who previously did not "like" Glavas' Facebook page.

The designation "sponsored" means that the administrators decided to pay to promote the post, and thus reach as many Facebook users as possible.

The Zagreb District Court recently rejected the prosecution's motion to once again detain Glavas.

He was found guilty in the so-called Duct Tape Case for ordering members of a unit known as the SUS to arrest, torture and murder seven civilians. Their bodies were...