“Experience has shown that in Kosovo is not easy to collect evidence based on the testimonies due to insufficient protection of witnesses,” considered an Austrian law professor Joseph Marko.
He warns that when prominent politicians are under the suspicion, it was always difficult to find evidence and witnesses willing to accuse them.
Marko for Deutsche Welle in an interview, was speaking about the challenges of the future Special Court for war crimes in Kosovo, and said that the time certainly was working for the perpetrators because, as he points out, it is very difficult to collect evidence after all this time, especially because majority of work would be based on testimony of witnesses.
Asked whether this Court can succeed in protecting witnesses in which EULEX failed, an Austrian professor suggests that Kosovo is quite a small area and population, and it is difficult to establish an effective witness protection system.
– I doubt that an international court may resolve the issue in which even EULEX failed – he says.
Marko believes that the Special Court shall be established according to the example of the Hague Tribunal and estimates that it will probably have a similar organization as far as the prosecution and the court.
He believes, however, that this court will face the same problem that had the Hague tribunal because, as he says, it shall be able to prosecute only individuals, not the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) as an organization.
– Therefore, it should be noted that this is not about collective guilt. There is no possibility that the court deals with collective guilt in any way – says an Austrian professor and adds that the Hague Tribunal completely failed in this regard and that the insinuation that it was about a collective guilt was counterproductive for the work of the court.
