Vucic: No One Should Face Charges Over Paunovic Remarks

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said everything retired prosecutor Jasmina Paunovic has said on television and online should be released to the public, but that no one should face criminal charges over it. He spoke on Thursday, July 30, shortly after 1 p.m. on Kablar near Cacak, while touring the glass viewpoint there and taking questions from reporters.

It was the first time the president had commented on the criminal complaint filed by the Belgrade Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office against Paunovic and broadcaster and host Dejan Lucic. Vucic called the former prosecutor’s remarks sobering and said they had shown who those people are and what their politics amount to.

However repulsive it looks, however uncivilised it is, however anti-Serbian it is, all of it, everything you said on that man’s show, and I will not say what I think of him, I believe it should all be released to the public, and that nobody should face criminal charges because of it.

The president is not asking for the case to stop because he disputes what was said. He is asking for it to stop because he calculates that the recordings serve him better than a prosecution would. That puts him at odds with the judiciary in the same week.

What the complaint actually alleges

The complaint charges Paunovic and Lucic with two counts of racial and other discrimination. Prosecutors point to the YouTube programme Lucic Inserts of July 21, 2026 as the central trigger, together with remarks made on the shows Otisak, Bez pardona and Glas javnosti between June 16 and July 13, 2026.

According to the prosecution statement, the injured parties are:

• members of the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), political opponents and public prosecutors
• the president of the republic and members of his family
• members of certain ethnic groups, Arabs and Black people

That list explains how quickly the case moved from a legal matter to a political one. The president is named among the injured parties and is at the same time the man publicly calling for no prosecution.

Is there a student list?

Paunovic has argued that the campaign against her was launched because she is on the student electoral list. That is the claim Vucic attacked most directly.

How is she on the student list when the student list does not exist, and now all of a sudden it does?

The question is not an aside. By denying the list exists, the president denies the frame in which the opposition reads the whole case, that of a political rival being hounded ahead of an election cycle. No list means no candidate, and no candidate means no persecution of one.

How the case reached prosecutors

The row began a week earlier. National Assembly Speaker Ana Brnabic held a press conference on July 24 devoted to what she described as hate speech by Paunovic over the previous three days. The prosecution complaint followed.

Paunovic then announced lawsuits against those who, she says, damaged her reputation and honour with falsehoods, Brnabic and the Informer television channel among them. Vucic had already responded to that announcement, and we covered it in Vucic on Jasmina Paunovic lawsuit: Absurd and shameful. What is new is that he is now offering to drop the prosecution rather than escalate.

Paunovic responds

The former prosecutor rejected the complaint outright. She said it was entirely unfounded and arbitrary, torn out of context and interpreted in the language of a regime servant, and that fabricated matters were being forced into law. She described the whole proceeding as a fight against the student list.

Two readings now sit side by side. Prosecutors call it discrimination, Paunovic calls it a political reckoning, and the president calls it material that should be released and left to voters to judge.

His statement carries no legal weight. The complaint has been filed and the prosecution decides what happens to it, and so far it has acted in the opposite direction. The next step is a decision on whether the complaint is dismissed or an investigation is opened, and that date will show how much of the president’s position was a political message and how much was a preview of the outcome.