(MENAFN- The Journal Of Turkish Weekly) The international war crimes court revoked the temporary release of Serbian Radical Party leader Vojislav Seselj, ordering him to return to custody in the Netherlands immediately.
The appeals chamber at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) ruled on Monday that war crimes defendant Seselj, who was temporarily released last year for cancer treatment, must go back into detention.
It said that Seselj's statements since his return to Belgrade last November, insisting that he would not return to the UN-backed court for the verdict in his war crimes trial, "eroded the essential pre-conditions for provisional release".
The merits of a further provisional release could be discussed, but only after Seselj is back in the Tribunal's detention unit, it added.
Seselj reacted defiantly to the announcement, defying Serbia's leaders to send him back by force.
"Let's see how [Serbian Prime Minister] Aleksandar Vucic and [President] Tomislav Nikolic will arrest me now," Seselj told the Vecernje novosti newspaper.
"The police can come, they are the ones who make arrests. If the gendarmerie [armed interior ministry officers] come, they beat [people]; I will have to watch my back. It won't be an easy job for them to arrest me," he said.
Seselj also said that Serbia will have to respect the extradition time procedure and during that period he will "try to question The Hague's request for a return [to custody]" because his rights in the Netherlands would be threatened, he alleged.
Rasim Ljajic, Serbia's deputy prime minister and the president of the national council for cooperation with the ICTY, admitted that the decision could cause diffculties for the Belgrade government.
"They didn't ask us when they released him. The guarantees we gave [to the ICTY about Seselj's release] were under the condition that he accepts them, just like he was supposed to accept the ICTY's conditions for provisional release. They didn't pay attention to that and now they have made a decision that will be problematic again," Ljajic told newspaper Blic.
The Tribunal ordered Seselj's temporary release in November last year on humanitarian grounds, because of his poor health, but since returning to Belgrade, he has led nationalist protests and made a series of hardline statements that have angered war victims.
He said immediately after his release that he would not voluntarily return to the court in The Hague for the verdict in his trial and would stage protests against any attempt to send him back.
"There will be no voluntary return to The Hague for me," he said.
The European parliament in November adopted a resolution urging the Tribunal to rethink its decision to free Seselj.
"The European parliament strongly condemns Seselj's warmongering, incitement to hatred and encouragement of territorial claims and his attempts to derail Serbia from its European path," said the resolution.
Croatia has also condemned his release and called for him to be returned to The Hague.
Seselj had been in custody since 2003, when he voluntarily surrendered. He is on trial for wartime crimes in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia.
The verdict in his case was scheduled for October 2013, but was postponed after one of the judges in the trial was removed for alleged bias.
The new judge is expected to take until at least the end of June 2015 to familiarise himself with details of the case, causing yet another delay in the marathon trial.
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