"Who says that Brussels is against the bill?" Kosor said in a prime-time news programme of the commercial television network Nova TV when asked by the programme's host whether she would withdraw the bill from Parliament should Brussels continue to insist on it.

Kosor said that the Commission's letter contained several questions to which the government has responded. "I believe our colleagues in Brussels will be very pleased," she added.

"Today I spoke to Mr Ambassador about the protection of Croatian national interests, the fact that we adopted resolutions on independence back in 1991 and that the documents which are cited in the indictments from Serbia are not binding on us," Kosor said. "What we are seeing is that Croatian veterans are again being humiliated and that Croatia's stability is being undermined."

Kosor reiterated that President Ivo Josipovic and the opposition thought that the bill was bad and unnecessary, but that they had no answer as to how to stop the prosecution of Croatian war veterans in 2011.

"It is interesting that neither the President nor the opposition criticise the Serbian law of 2003, which was amended in 2010 to expand Serbia's jurisdiction to include Croatia, but think that the bill proposed by the Croatian government is bad. The opposition think it is bad, but they have no solution," Kosor said.

"The present mechanisms are certainly not enough. We have two agreements by the two prosecutors' offices and the two ministries, but they have not produced a desired result," Kosor said when asked why the government had responded by proposing a bill only after an indictment had been issued against Vladimir Seks, the deputy speaker of Parliament and senior official of the ruling HDZ party. She said that the government had invested a lot of effort before, citing the case of veteran Tihomir Purda.