01 Oct 14
While Kosovo remains without a government, the new special court to try Kosovo Liberation Army war crimes suspects cannot start work as planned in January, BIRN has learned.

Marija Ristic
BIRN
Belgrade

Sources within the EU have told BIRN that it is unlikely that the high-profile new court will be established and running as planned in January 2015 because Kosovo has been stuck in political deadlock without a government since elections four months ago.

“The political situation in Kosovo is not close to being resolved and we need additional laws to be adopted by Kosovo parliament in order to get the court functional,” a senior EU official told BIRN.

The court is to be set up in the Netherlands and some senior officials of the Kosovo Liberation Army are expected to be indicted for alleged crimes committed after the 1998-99 war with Belgrade’s forces.

The EU Council on Monday approved the EU rule-of-law mission in Kosovo, EULEX’s mandate to support the new special court which will institute proceedings arising from the recent European Union Special Investigative Task Force report.

The report said that unnamed KLA officials would face indictments for “a campaign of persecution that was directed against the ethnic Serb, Roma, and other minority populations of Kosovo and toward fellow Kosovo Albanians who they labeled either to be collaborators with Serbs or, more commonly, simply to have been political opponents of the KLA leadership”, according to Clint Williamson, the lead prosecutor with the task force.

Their crimes include “unlawful killings, abductions, enforced disappearances, illegal detentions in camps in Kosovo and Albania, sexual violence, other forms of inhumane treatment, forced displacements of individuals from their homes and communities, and desecration and destruction of churches and other religious sites”, Williamson said.

He said there were “compelling indications” that “a few individuals were killed with the intention of extracting their organs” by KLA fighters, but the allegations that hundreds of prisoners were killed and their organs sold was “totally unsupported”.

BIRN’s EU source said that the Kosovo authorities, including President Atifete Jahjaga, have promised that the laws concerning the establishment of the new court will be adopted as soon as possible and will be first on the agenda of the new parliament.

But it is still not clear when the political crisis in Kosovo will be resolved. The deadlock began amid a struggle for power between competing parties after the elections when MPs were unable to elect a parliamentary speaker, and therefore a new government could also not be elected.

The biggest parliamentary group, the Democratic Party of Kosovo, PDK - the only party with the right to nominate the speaker - does not have enough seats in the legislature to do so.

A court in July threw out the election as speaker of the opposition leader, Isa Mustafa, and declared that the PDK had the sole right to nominate a candidate.

But the court did not specify how the assembly should proceed if the biggest parliamentary group failed to elect the speaker. If the situation continues, Kosovo may face new elections.