Belgrade: UN to give political interpretation of ruling

Late on Thursday, Tadic announced that the first in a series of Belgrade's steps now will be sending special envoys to more than 50 states worldwide, who will take Tadic personal message to those countries' leaders.

"Serbia continues with the diplomatic initiative so it can prepare as well as it can for the debate in the UN General Assembly," Prime Minister Mirko Cvetković announced.

The ICJ's advisory opinion will now be forwarded to the UN General Assembly, which was the body that sent the case to the tribunal in the fall of 2008, at Serbia's request.

The Serbian president told reporters in Belgrade that this will be a new chance for international assessment of the "legality of Kosovo's independence". He added that this, yet another difficult decision made regarding Serbia's interests, "did not mean that its diplomatic struggle for Kosovo was over".

"The decision of the International Court of Justice that the unilateral declaration of independence of Kosovo does not violate international law is difficult for Serbia, and our public should be openly told that. However, it is clear that the court did not declare itself about the right to secession, but has decided to discuss exclusively the technical content of the declaration on independence," the president pointed out.

"The text of the (Kosovo Albanian) declaration, by itself, does not violate international law considering that it doesn't touch on it. Therefore the court avoided declaring itself about the essential question and left it up to the highest organ of the UN, the General Assembly, to discuss that and all political implications," Tadic said.

As this body meets in New York in the fall, Serbia will fight to push the adoption of a resolution that will call for negotiations which will solve the conflict in Serbian-Albanian relations. Until then, both the president and the Foreign Ministry are announcing a clear plan of diplomatic activities.