A French Foreign Ministry spokesman said at a regular press briefing on Tuesday that France was closely following the case of Croatian writer Predrag Matvejevic.
"He's an intellectual, a Croatian writer with whom we have been in close contact for years. He was a professor at the College de France. He was convicted in 2005, but he has never been in prison. It is obvious that under present circumstance he will not go to prison," the spokesman said.
He explained that there were no grounds any more for imprisonment of Matvejevic for defamation because Croatia would amend the law to decriminalise defamation. He added that France had been closely monitoring the case and had been in close contact with the Croatian authorities.
In 2004, a Zagreb court sentenced Matvejevic to five months in prison with two years' probation for slandering the writer Mile Pesorda in a Jutarnji List article entitled "Our Taliban".
Matvejevic would not appeal against the ruling, so it became final in 2005. The Chief Public Prosecutor's Office resorted to an extraordinary legal remedy, asking the Supreme Court to protect legality against the final verdict, but the court ruled in May this year that there was no miscarriage of justice in the case.
An Italian member of the European Parliament, Debora Serracchiani, has asked European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton to take "action against the verdict against the intellectual Predrag Matvejevic".
