{"id":74610,"date":"2025-06-02T08:31:59","date_gmt":"2025-06-02T08:31:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kosovapress.com\/eng\/admin\/?p=74610"},"modified":"2025-06-02T08:32:00","modified_gmt":"2025-06-02T08:32:00","slug":"transitional-justice-expert-the-specialist-court-was-created-for-serbias-interests","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kosovapress.com\/eng\/admin\/transitional-justice-expert-the-specialist-court-was-created-for-serbias-interests\/","title":{"rendered":"Transitional justice expert: The Specialist Court was created for Serbia\u2019s interests"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Specialist Court is a political institution that will not bring justice and will only strengthen Serbian nationalists who want to change the narrative of the 1990\u20131999 period, says transitional justice expert Aidan Hehir in an interview with KosovaPress<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hehir \u2014 a scholar of transitional justice, humanitarian intervention, and state-building in Kosovo from the University of Westminster in the UK \u2014 emphasizes that the process known as \u201cthe big trial\u201d in The Hague has been excessively prolonged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The former commanders of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), Hashim Tha\u00e7i, Kadri Veseli, Jakup Krasniqi, and Rexhep Selimi, have been held in pre-trial detention in The Hague since November 2020.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Office of the Specialist Prosecutor has charged Tha\u00e7i and the others with alleged war crimes. They have pleaded not guilty to all counts of the indictment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their trial began on April 3, 2023 \u2014 nearly three years after the indictment was confirmed and since the former KLA leaders have been held in the detention center in The Hague.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYes, in a word [the process in The Hague has been prolonged]. This was a court established in 2014\u20132015. It is still going on now. It is a court that should never have been created. It lacks the most important element: local legitimacy. It is a court that was imposed on Kosovo by the international community. At the time it was established, Hashim Tha\u00e7i even\u00a0said, \u2018I\u2019m encouraging people to vote for the establishment of this court, not because I want to establish it, but because I\u2019ve been told that it must be established.\u2019 That is coercion. That is the international community bullying a sovereign state, the government of a sovereign state, the parliament of a sovereign state, to establish a court. And why? Why was this court established? You don\u2019t need\u00a0to be a genius or a conspiracy theorist to understand why. It was established\u00a0to appease Serbia. To say to\u00a0Serbia: look, we are giving you this. Serbia obviously wanted this court to be created. It wants to change the narrative about the 1990s. It wants to create this ongoing\u00a0continuous conveyer belt\u00a0through which Kosovo Albanians militants\u00a0are tried for crimes against humanity, a process that will go on for years and years. That\u00a0fits their narrative of the war, which says that there were two sides involved in a civil war who both did terrible things. A narrative that says: \u2018they are just as bad as we are.\u2019 So, the only reason this court was created was to serve Serbian interests,\u201d\u00a0<\/em>says Hehir.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Specialist Chambers are part of Kosovo\u2019s judicial system but operate with international staff in The Hague, Netherlands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The European Union is the main financial backer of the Specialist Court, which was established in 2015 by the Kosovo Assembly following international pressure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Third countries also contribute to this court: the United States, Switzerland, Canada, Norway, and Turkey. The United States contributes by funding personnel appointed by them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Court has been continually criticized for extensive redactions and its lack of public access.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even Kosovo\u2019s Ombudsperson, Naim Qelaj, has expressed concerns about the Court’s operations. Qelaj has questioned whether the Specialist Court is respecting the principles of a fair and impartial trial.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Professor Hehir says that precisely due to the lack of transparency, perceptions of this institution in Kosovo are overwhelmingly negative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt is a deeply political institution, created for political reasons, and its existence \u2014 like that of UNMIK and EULEX in Kosovo \u2014 proves that the international community is not necessarily acting in Kosovo\u2019s interest in every case… This court is simply, as I said, a political body that will not bring justice. The only thing it will do is strengthen Serbian nationalists who want to change the narrative about the 1990s,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0says Hehir.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A month ago, the Office of the Specialist Prosecutor concluded its case in the Tha\u00e7i and others trial. A total of 125 witnesses have testified in court against the former KLA leaders, and thousands of pages of documents have been submitted as material evidence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Defense attorneys have already announced motions to dismiss the charges. What is known now is that if these motions are rejected, they will call several witnesses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The defense of the former KLA commanders has considered the prosecution\u2019s case weak and has declared that they expect a positive outcome at the end of the trial.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So far, the Specialist Court has issued two convictionfor alleged war crimes and other offenses related to the administration of justice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis court is nominally a court of Kosovo, but it is located in The Hague, so fundamentally it is a strange court, though its legal composition differs from that of the ICTY,\u201d <\/em>says Aidan Hehir.\/KosovaPress<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Specialist Court is a political institution that will not bring justice and will only strengthen Serbian nationalists who want to change the narrative of the 1990\u20131999 period, says transitional justice expert Aidan Hehir in an interview with KosovaPress. Hehir \u2014 a scholar of transitional justice, humanitarian intervention, and state-building in Kosovo from the University of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":74611,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[301,296],"tags":[343,580,6180],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kosovapress.com\/eng\/admin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74610"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kosovapress.com\/eng\/admin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kosovapress.com\/eng\/admin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kosovapress.com\/eng\/admin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kosovapress.com\/eng\/admin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74610"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kosovapress.com\/eng\/admin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74610\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":74612,"href":"https:\/\/kosovapress.com\/eng\/admin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74610\/revisions\/74612"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kosovapress.com\/eng\/admin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kosovapress.com\/eng\/admin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kosovapress.com\/eng\/admin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kosovapress.com\/eng\/admin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}