Abstract
A year ago, in February 1975, the Yugoslav writer and university lecturer Mihajlo Mihajlov was sentenced by the District Court at Novi Sad to seven years' imprisonment on charges of ‘hostile propaganda’, arising out of the publication of a number of his articles in the West. It was his third conviction in 10 years on similar counts. The sentence also stipulates that he shall not publish any work in Yugoslavia for another four years after his release.
The trial was attended by two Dutch and one British observer: Professor Riiter, head of the Department of Criminal Law, University of Amsterdam, and Dr Broekmeyer from the Institute of East European Studies of the same university, on behalf of Amnesty International; and Melanie Anderson for the International League for the Rights of Man in New York. What follows here is a part of her report on the proceedings.
The Court consisted of the President, Dragomir Cvetković, another professional judge and four lay assessors. The Prosecution was led by Radovan Jozanov, while two lawyers defended the accused - Dr Jovan Barović, a wartime Partisan and former Party member expelled in the mid-1950s, and Dr Veljko Kovaĉević, both of whom conducted the Defence at the 1963 trial of Milovan Djilas.
Mihajlov was sentenced under Article 118 (1). The seven-year term of imprisonment came as a shock, both to the onlookers present in Court and to Mihajlov and his counsel, says Melanie Anderson in her assessment of the trial, in which she points out that if Yugoslavia respected the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, of which she was a signatory, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), which she had ratified, Mihajlov could neither have been charged nor sentenced for writing and publishing his articles
No appeal was made against the sentence on the grounds that this was a political trial with a politically predetermined sentence that had little, if anything, to do with the proceedings in court, which were generally acknowledged to have been conducted with reasonable fairness and impartiality. In such circumstances, remission or release - will depend on political rather than judicial considerations.