13 Oct 14
The EU’s former chief war crimes investigator Clint Williamson has joined the Washington-based think-tank established by former Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

Marija Ristic
BIRN
Belgrade

Williamson, who ended his three-year mandate as chief prosecutor of the EU Special Investigative Task Force in charge of probing war crime allegations against Kosovo Liberation Army, has been appointed senior director for law and national security at the McCain Institute for International Leadership.

The Washington-based Institute was established by US senator McCain, who ran against current President Barack Obama in the 2008 elections.

On its website, the Institute says it is “guided by the values that have animated the career of senator McCain” and is committed to “sustaining America’s global leadership and upholding freedom, democracy and human rights as universal human values”.

Besides Williamson, other US diplomats with Balkan experience also work for the Institute, including Michael Polt, former US ambassador to Serbia and Montenegro, who is its senior director.

The Institute is also part of Arizona State University, where Williamson will work as a law professor.

Williamson was previously a prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the US Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues. He also worked in the justice department of the United Nations Missions in Kosovo, UNMIK, and as an advisor to the Iraqi government.

In July this year, prior ending his mandate as the EU Special Investigative Task Force chief prosecutor, Williamson presented a report on its three-year investigation into war crimes and organ-trafficking allegations that were made in a 2011 by a Council of Europe rapporteur.

Williamson's 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”.

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.

The EU Council last month tasked the EU rule-of-law mission in Kosovo, with supporting a new special court which will institute proceedings arising from the Special Investigative Task Force report.

However, BIRN has learned that while Kosovo remains without a government, the new special court cannot start work as planned in January.

According to BIRN sources, in order for the court to be fully functional, legal changes must be adopted by the Kosovo assembly, which is still not established five months after the parliamentary elections.