Kosovo Serb MP’s Jail Sentence for ‘Ethnic Hatred’ Upheld

The head of the Serbia's government's office for Kosovo, Petar Petkovic, said on Wednesday that the confirmation of the two-year sentence handed down to Kosovo MP and former minister Ivan Todosijevic was a "shameful, unacceptable and political verdict".

Kosovo's Court of Appeal upheld the verdict from 2019 that convicted Todosijevic of ethnic, racial or religious intolerance for his comments about the January 1999 massacre of 45 Kosovo Albanians in the village of Racak/Recak, which he claimed was staged.

In the Court of Appeal's decision, issued on June 24 but made public on the court website on Tuesday, it said that it "finds the defence claim that the facts were wrongly determined to be unfounded".

It said that Todosijevic's comments "could incite hatred, division, intolerance between ethnic groups in Kosovo" and went too far to be acceptable under laws guaranteeing freedom of expression.

But Petkovic accused the Kosovo authorities of stifling freedom of speech. He told public broadcaster Radio-Television Serbia, RTS that "Pristina tried to tape up the mouths of the entire Serbian people, not just Ivan Todosijevic".

According to Kosovo's constitution, an MP loses his or her mandate if they are convicted of a crime and sentenced to one or more years in prison under a final court decision.

Todosijevic was elected as an MP with the main Belgrade-backed political force in Kosvo, Srpska Lista, in October 2019. He was minister for administration and local government in the Kosovo government until he was sacked for making the comments in March 2020.

He made his statement about the Racak/Recak massacre at a ceremony to mark the 20th anniversary of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, which was aimed at making Serbian leader...