From the podium of the United Nations General Assembly, Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic delivered a direct objection to Serbia: the military honours paid to Ratko Mladic after his death were, as he put it, an insult to his victims and to the verdicts of the international court. And he added a sentence that carries more weight than the objection itself - such an act runs against the very European values Serbia claims it wants to adopt.

This is not a dispute over interpreting history. Mladic was convicted by a final judgment of an international court. When a country that is a candidate for EU membership stages a state act around such a figure, the question is not emotional - it is institutional: what exactly does adopting European criteria mean if the verdicts of courts whose jurisdiction that country recognised are treated as a matter of taste?

Small states, and law as the only defence

Plenkovic built his entire speech around one idea: rules-based international law is not naivety, but the only thing standing between smaller states and the right of the stronger. "Not because we are naive," he said, "but because we have seen and lived the alternative." For countries of our size, he added, that law is the boundary between order and tyranny, between sovereign equality and the rule of force.

He offered Croatia's war of the 1990s as evidence for that claim - nearly 20,000 dead and 1,725 people still registered as missing today. Thirty years on, families are still waiting for a grave. That is a figure no country in this region reads as somebody else's statistic.

He carried the same logic over to Ukraine, in a formulation worth remembering: peace must not reward conquest, and reconstruction cannot be separated from justice. That sentence collides head-on with every proposal to "freeze" a conflict along the front line.

And one debt closer to home

Plenkovic also raised electoral reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where in his view Croats are left without legitimate representation - a situation he called unjust and destabilising. Here we enter terrain where every side in Bosnia has its own version of the same story, and twenty-five years of international mediation have produced no agreement everyone accepts.

What remains after the speech is a question not addressed to Belgrade alone. If the verdicts of international courts are binding only on those who are weaker, then what guarantee do smaller states have that their own accounts will ever be settled? The call for UN reform, which Plenkovic also mentioned, only starts to make sense once that question is answered.