Leader of the Serbian Radical Party (SRS), Vojislav Šešelj, is responsible for the persecution and deportation of ethnic Croats in the northern Serbian province of Vojvodina in the early 1990s, the Appeals Chamber of the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (MICT) said in their final verdict on Wednesday.

MICT is the successor to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), formed by the UN Security Council in 2010 to perform the remaining functions of ICTY.

The prosecution asked the Appeals Chamber to deliver a guilty verdict and a 28-year prison sentence for Šešelj, for instigating war crimes with his hate-mongering speeches, or to order a retrial.

However, the ruling by the ICTY Trial Chamber III from March 31, 2016, acquitting Šešelj of all charges, was only partially reversed.

The MICT Appeals Chamber entered convictions against Mr. Šešelj for instigating deportation, persecution (forcible displacement), and other inhumane acts (forcible transfer) as crimes against humanity. He was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, counting the time he had spent in the ICTY detention against the sentence.

This means Šešelj will not spend any time in prison, as he had already spent more than 11 years in ICTY detention between February 2003 and November 2014. He was then allowed to return to Serbia for cancer treatment, but soon became politically active again, and led the SRS in the April 2016 parliamentary election, with Šešelj winning a seat in Serbia’s parliament. He did not attend today’s hearing.

According to the prosecution, the (ICTY) trial chamber came, despite abundant evidence, to a “stunning” conclusion that there had been no systemic and widespread attacks on non-Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, no joint criminal enterprise, and that Šešelj was not responsible for war crimes against non-Serbs in the region. It ruled that Šešelj’s hate-mongering speeches served to raise soldiers’ morale on the ground and that they did not result in persecution.

Systematic and widespread crimes occurred in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and the Trial Chamber erred by finding otherwise, MICT said. In particular, the Appeals Chamber found that the Trial Chamber erred in not holding Mr. Šešelj responsible for a speech he gave in Hrtkovci, Vojvodina (Serbia), on May 6, 1992, where he publicly called for the expulsion of non-Serb locals.