The forcibly mobilised men were refugees from Croatia who fled to Serbia during the August 1995 Storm operation. However, the Serbian police returned some of them as soon as they reached the border and some of them took from the refugee shelters to the Croatian town of Erdut, which was at that time held by Serb rebels and paramilitaries.
The seven men were escorted by the police to a camp of paramilitaries led by notorious Zeljko Raznatovic Arkan where they were "exposed to extremely humiliating treatment and violence". After they were trained in the camp, they were forcibly enrolled in the units of the army of the Serb statelet called the Republic of Srpska Krajina.
The request for the compensation was filed by the Humanitarian Law Centre, a local nongovernmental human rights and humanitarian law organization, which reported on Monday about the Supreme Court's ruling.
By this ruling, the Supreme Court confirmed the responsibility of Serbia for violations of freedoms and rights which refugees should enjoy under the international convention on refugee status.
During the summer 1995, Serbian Interior Ministry groundlessly detained about 10,000 refugees from Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, taking them by force to Serb units in Croatia and Serbia. According to the same source, many of them were killed and those who survived today suffer physical and mental consequences.
The Centre added that it had represented and was representing cases of 700 forcibly mobilised men who demanded damages.