Since Kosovo is not a UN member, it would be able to submit a lawsuit before International Court of Justice only upon the special recommendation of the UN Security Council. However, even if something like that would happen, the Court would declare incompetent, believe experts.
Deputy PM of the interim Kosovo institutions is talking for a long time that Pristina is preparing the lawsuit against Serbia, for genocide committed against Albanians in 1999. Two days ago, parliamentary group of his party submitted to the Kosovo Assembly recommendation of the “Resolution on genocide committed by the Serbs”.
Professor at the Law Faculty Bojan Milisavljevic said that Kosovo cannot submit the lawsuit due to several reasons. The first reason is that Kosovo didn’t ratify the Convention on genocide, which is mandatory in order to submit lawsuit for violation of the rights stipulated by the same Convention. If Kosovo would even in meantime ratify the convention the next obstacle would be that Pristina is talking about the alleged crimes committed in 1999, and Kosovo declared independence in 2008. “Even if Court would treat Kosovo as a state the problem would be temporal jurisdiction, because at the time when disputable events happened Kosovo was not a member of the UN, and it didn’t accept the statute of the Court,” said Milisavljevic.
ICJ ruled the cases in which the parties, at the time of the trial, were not members of the UN (Germany, Switzerland) but they accepted the part of the UN Chapter that relates to the Court Statute. However, Milisavljevic claims that something like that is possible only upon the special approval of the UN SC: “Even if Pristina succeed to submit lawsuit in that way, the judges would have to decide if they have the jurisdiction. However, the jurisdiction exists only if the other side would accept the lawsuit, what logically Serbia will not do.”
According to our interlocutor, the risk that Kosovo force Serbia to accept the position of “the respondent side”, due to some jointly signed agreements is absolutely excluded.
