UN prosecutors will Wednesday seek to overturn a controversial acquittal in the case against firebrand Serb ultranationalist Vojislav Seselj, found not guilty last year of war crimes during the Balkans conflicts. Seselj himself will be absent during the day-long hearing, refusing to travel back from Belgrade to hear prosecutors present their oral arguments to a five-judge appeals bench of the UN’s Mechanism for International Tribunals (MICT). It will be the first hearing since Bosnian Croat military commander Slobodan Praljak committed suicide on November 29 during the final case before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Praljak died after drinking cyanide in the courtroom when his 20-year jail term was upheld on appeal, in a case now being investigated by Dutch prosecutors. The MICT, based in the same building in The Hague, is handling the final appeal cases left by the ICTY. UN prosecutors are appealing after the ICTY judges found Seselj, 63, not guilty on nine counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in the 1990s Balkans wars. Prosecutors insist Seselj — once a stocky outspoken paramilitary commander — was behind the murders of many Croats, Muslims and other non-Serb civilians in an unrelenting quest to create a “Greater Serbia”. He was also accused of forcibly deporting “tens of thousands” from large areas of Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia. But in their surprise majority ruling, UN judges found the prosecution had failed to prove “there was a widespread systematic attack against the non-Serb civilian population in large areas of Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina.” The chamber also said prosecutors failed to prove any “causal link” between Seselj’s fiery speeches and the wave of atrocities. For instance, when Seselj told his troops during the deadly three-month siege of the Croatian town of Vukovar in 1991 “to spare no one”, he was merely “participating in the war effort by galvanising Serb forces,” the judges concluded. Seselj hailed his acquittal as “honourable and fair”, but legal experts and historians reacted with outrage and the verdict left prosecutors baffled. Experts said the judgement overturned international law and rewrote the history of the bloody Balkans conflicts triggered by ethnic upheavals caused as Yugoslavia broke apart in 1991 following the fall of communism. In an unusually strong dissenting opinion, Italian judge Flavia Lattanzi said her two fellow judges used “insufficient reasoning, or no reasoning at all” in their findings. Published in Daily Times, December 11th 2017.