The secretary of the Serbian Government's Council for National Minorities, Petar Ladjevic, said that the declaration contained "a huge number of untruths" and that the document would not contribute to the promotion of human rights in Serbia.
The chairman of the Executive Council of Vojvodina, Bojan Pajtic, said that the highest European standards were applied to the Croatian minority, and that the provincial government guaranteed the Croatian minority education in the Croatian language, that Croatian had been declared an official language in Vojvodina and that a Croatian-language news weekly was financed from the provincial budget.
Political analyst Tomislav Zigmanov said he was concerned about "somewhat hysterical reactions" the declaration provoked in the Serbian public. "The document only indicates some of the problems the Croats in Vojvodina are faced with, without offering solutions," he said.
A public debate on the position of national minorities in Serbia, provoked by the Croatian declaration, escalated as threatening graffiti directed at the Hungarian minority appeared in the provincial capital Novi Sad. This in turn prompted the strongest Hungarian political party, the League of Hungarians of Vojvodina, to demand resignation from Minister Ljajic, accusing him of "sweeping the incidents under the carpet".
The DSHV claims in the declaration on the position of the Croatian people in Vojvodina that the Croats are in an unequal position in relation to the Serbs as the majority ethnic group and other minorities, and that Serbia does not protect the national minorities in accordance with international standards.