Inciting mass crimes through hate speech: The dangerous rhetoric of the Serb political leader Vojislav Šešelj

A media campaign fomenting racial, national, ethnic, or religious hatred, in which public leaders give voice to their most extreme and violent thoughts, can possibly constitute the harbinger of an armed conflict, whether national or international. The present dissertation takes the shape of a journey towards the criminalization of inciting speech as an international crime. This is an unsettled area of international criminal law and prosecutors have spent a great deal to prove a causal nexus between speech acts and subsequent mass slaughters, often with meager outcomes. The efforts of international criminal tribunals to hold such inciters criminally responsible will be evaluated focusing on three leading judgments rendered by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and the two ad hoc Tribunals for Rwanda and for the former Yugoslavia, whose findings have, in some cases, met the expectations of the “international court of public opinion”, whilst, in yet other instances, came as a bolt from the blue. The core argument revolves around a comprehensive study of one of the most significant “Propaganda Trials” in the recent history of international jurisprudence, the case against the accused Vojislav Šešelj, one of the greatest war propagandists of the Yugoslav conflict, which brought to the dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Head of the Serbian Radical Party who propagated hatred in his incendiary public speeches in the name of “Greater Serbia” and managed the organization of thousands of volunteers to take active part in operations of deportation and forcible transfer of non-Serb population, Šešelj was acquitted of all charges on 31 March 2016. Following discontent with this outcome, the Appeals Chamber ultimately overturned the Trial Chamber’s verdict of acquittal of Vojislav Šešelj, and found it necessary to enter a new conviction against him on appeal, a chance to clear earlier jurisprudence from any further ambiguity concerning the legal regulation of hate speech, even though such opportunity has not been fully exploited.