This week’s dramatic hunger strike by Marija Vasić, a high school teacher, brought renewed attention to the case of six political activists who had been incarcerated in Novi Sad since 14 March 2025. It is believed that the aim of the government is for the arrested to admit the dubious charge of preparing a violent overthrow of the constitutional order. According to Vasić’s lawyer, this would “legalise its claim about the coloured revolution”, a narrative that the government has been pushing for months in the context of the ongoing student protests.
On 20 May, Vasić and two others were placed under house arrest, while the remaining three activists remain in prison. The court’s decision to allow house arrest sparked outrage from the ruling party, whose members have labelled the activists as terrorists and coup plotters. President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, accused the judges of operating “under the principle of a coloured revolution”. Conversely, supporters of the activists consider them to be the first serious case of political prisoners under the Vučić regime.
Some of the activists arrested in March are members of the liberal Free Citizens Movement (PSG), an opposition party, while others belong to a student group “Stav” (“Stance”), which was active before the outbreak of the ongoing student protests in Serbia in November 2024.
The six activists were arrested in mid-March after their secretly recorded conversation was sensationally broadcasted on national television stations as “proof” of a plot for a coup attempt on 15 March, when the largest protest in the history of Serbia took place.
Another six participants in the meeting were outside Serbia when the arrests happened and have not returned to the country since. An arrest warrant for them was subsequently issued.
The reaction to the arrests was limited at first, but it gained momentum as the weeks passed. On 15 May, protesting students, opposition politicians and citizens started blocking the entrances to the Higher Court and Court of Appeals in Novi Sad, demanding the release of the activists.
On the same day, Marija Vasić, one of the arrested activists, started a hunger and thirst strike. After several days, she was transferred to a hospital of the Central Prison in Belgrade, but her lawyer and family members were unable to visit her and did not receive any updates on her health for days.
Finally, on 20 May, Vasić was visited by her lawyer, who confirmed that she had stopped refusing water but continued with the hunger strike. Vasić was released from prison by a court order several hours later and placed under house arrest, together with two other activists.
The ruling Serbian Progressive Party vehemently condemned this court decision, announcing that it would stage its own blockade of the Court next week, demanding the release of its members who physically assaulted students in January, which prompted the resignations of Prime Minister Miloš Vučević and Novi Sad mayor Milan Đurić.
Ruling party members, including President Aleksandar Vučić, shared posts on social media praising as heroes the four arrested SNS members who attacked students putting up posters in front of party offices, braking one student’s jaw.
Asked by the pro-government television Pink on 21 May whether there was a chance that the other three persons would be released from custody, Vučić said that this was possible because the judges are operating “under the principle of a coloured revolution”. The narrative on the “coloured revolution” has been used by the ruling party for months to describe the ongoing protests, claiming, without evidence, that they were backed from abroad to destabilise Serbia.
Vučić claimed that somebody was paying the members of the judiciary from the outside and that “it is obvious that they do not want to protect the order”.
“We know that they are no political prisoners, but plainly terrorists, who were planning the most severe criminal acts against their state. For that, they would receive 20 or 30 years in prison in any other country, and nobody would dare mention them. However, in our country, everything has been turned upside down”, Vučić said.
On 22 May, the Higher Court in Novi Sad extended the custody of the remaining three activists until 12 June, assessing that, if they are released, they might repeat the act they are suspected of.
Arrests after a leaked conversation
On 13 March, two days before the massive protest in Belgrade, the biggest pro-government television channels jointly broadcast a two-hour special dedicated to a leaked recording of the meeting of activists in Novi Sad.
The activists, who were not the organisers of the protests, discussed possible actions they could take depending on the course of events. They mentioned a possible entry into the building of the National Assembly of Serbia or the Radio-Television of Serbia, with one of the participants claiming that these would be symbolic acts. Several weeks earlier, this activist group entered the Novi Sad city hall, where they put on a flag of a bloodied hand on one of the windows, after which they were ejected by the police.
The Free Citizens Movement (PSG) immediately released a statement distancing itself from the conversation in which its members participated. Since their arrest, however, the party has argued that, while what they were saying was politically irresponsible, there were no elements of a criminal act in the conversation, which is also what the lawyers of the accused argue. Commentators and journalists pointed out that similar discussions can be heard in every pub across the country in the context of the ongoing protests.
On the other hand, the discussion was described by the pro-government journalists as proof of pending bloodshed and civil war on 15 March. The protest on that day passed relatively peacefully, with accusations against the government that it had, at one point, used an unidentified acoustic device against the protesters.
The question of how the recording was made in the first place was also raised. The pro-government journalists claimed that the recording was made by one of the participants who felt the urge to share the information with the public. This person, however, has never been identified.
Most of the public immediately assumed that the recording was instead made by the Security and Intelligence Agency (BIA), which was later confirmed by the group’s lawyers, who claimed that the recording could not be used as evidentiary material.
On 12 May, after two months in prison, the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office in Novi Sad officially charged the activists with preparing an attack on the constitutional order and calling for a violent overthrow of the constitutional order. The Prosecutor’s Office asked for a maximum sentence of five years in prison for preparing these acts.
Speaking for the Radio-Television of Vojvodina on 19 May, Aleksandar Petrović, lawyer of the accused Marija Vasić, said that he believed that this is an attempt by the government to legalise its claim about the coloured revolution.
He assessed that the lawyers of the accused are being kept in the dark about many procedural aspects of the process, including the lack of access to all judicial records.
“This case could become a precedent that would endanger the rights not only of these people, but all of us… I think that this is a good parallel to Watergate, with the exception that, in this case, we do not have a leader who will resign”, Petrović said.