The petition, which was signed by 1,236 citizens over the two days, urges the Croatian government not to allow the transfer of Jovic to The Hague after the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which accuses Jovic of contempt of court, issued a warrant for his arrest as he failed to appear before the tribunal to enter a plea earlier this week.
The organisers of the campaign, local branches of the Croatian Journalists' Society, say that they could have collected tens of thousands of signatures, but that was not the purpose of the campaign.
They say that the aim of the campaign is to shift the attention to the case of the accused reporter Jovic, whom they say the ICTY accuses groundlessly, in light of the fact that the protected witness in question did not himself conceal his testimony. They also claim that some respectable U.S. newspapers published the testimony even before the Slobodna Dalmacija daily did it.
On 9 September this year, the ICTY issued an indictment against Jovic charging him with publishing in the Slobodna Dalmacija daily the identity and testimony of a protected witness at the trial of Bosnian Croat commander Tihomir Blaskic in March 1998. Jovic published the testimony in the Split-based daily in November and December 2000, revealing the identity of the protected witness.
The HND branches stated that they were defending Jovic only in connection with his ICTY indictment and that they did not stand behind all texts he had published.