The truth and its consequences: Kosovo’s Specialist Court heads toward a momentous decision

On 16 September, the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague will announce the long-awaited verdict in the case against Hashim Thaçi, the former president of Kosovo, and three other former commanders of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the KLA — Kadri Veseli, Jakup Krasniqi and Rexhep Selimi.

Each of them has been charged by the Specialist Prosecutor’s Office with multiple counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, allegedly committed during 1998–2000, during and immediately after the brutal war with Serb forces.

The widely followed case is currently the world’s only war-crimes trial against a “senior leadership.” The verdict, whatever it is, will have profound consequences for a range of parties: the accused, Kosovo as a whole, the victims, the prosecution and the court itself; as well as for the European Union and related organizations, given the extraordinary amount of time and resources invested: 18 years (2008–2026) and a staggering 500 million euros.

Naturally, factors such as time and money should not influence court decisions. But Edward Joseph, a lawyer and professor at Johns Hopkins University, and an expert on Kosovo and the Balkans, raised some thought-provoking questions in an article published in Kosovo Online on 5 July 2026, which is worth quoting in full:

“Like everyone else, I am simply observing. I would say I am concerned. I will not make predictions, but I am concerned that there may be, consciously or unconsciously, a motivation for this court to convict the defendants,” Joseph wrote.

“Otherwise, how would they justify this process that has lasted for years and has been extraordinarily expensive, the high salaries, the staff and all the institutional support? They have a considerable budget, and then you take former President Hashim Thaçi, remove him from office, take him there and, in the end, you have nothing? Not even a single conviction? That is precisely why I am concerned this could turn into a conscious or unconscious motivation.”

To fully understand the extraordinary scale of this investment and to find answers to these questions, it is important to recall how much time and money has been invested over the years.

Investment in time

The seed of the creation of the Specialist Chambers and the Specialist Prosecutor’s Office was sown in 2008.

Carla Del Ponte, former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, ICTY, wrote in her memoirs, Madame Prosecutor, about grave crimes committed by KLA members against Serbs, Kosovo minorities and Albanian collaborators, including widespread trafficking of human organs.

Her shocking claims prompted a two-year investigation, from 2008 to 2010, by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, PACE, led by Swiss senator Dick Marty, which resulted in a report titled “Inhuman treatment of persons and illicit trafficking of human organs in Kosovo.”

Marty’s report confirmed many of Del Ponte’s accusations and named several suspected perpetrators, among them Hashim Thaçi and Kadri Veseli, who were among the founders of the KLA.

The alleged crimes included murder, abductions, torture, enforced disappearances and involvement in organized crime; the report also mentioned several cases of organ trafficking, far fewer than Del Ponte had claimed. The alleged victims, again, included Serbs, members of ethnic minority groups and political opponents of the KLA.

Although it lacked evidence, Marty’s report was adopted in its entirety through a PACE resolution in January 2011, in which organ trafficking was mentioned eight times in its three pages.

PACE called on the EU’s rule-of-law mission in Kosovo, EULEX, to ensure perpetrators were brought to justice. EULEX then authorized a broad criminal investigation by the EU’s Special Investigative Task Force, SITF, led by Clint Williamson, the former U.S. ambassador for war crimes.

In 2014, Williamson reported that SITF had sufficient evidence to indict several unnamed senior KLA officials for the crimes described in Marty’s report. Williamson agreed there were only a few trafficking cases, but that the evidence was insufficient for an indictment.

He recommended creating a special international court to prosecute the indictment. The EU and the U.S. strongly backed the idea, considering it far more appropriate for the “big fish,” like Thaçi, Veseli and other well-known KLA figures, to be prosecuted in a neutral country outside Kosovo, free from political interference and witness intimidation, and with an entirely international staff.

In 2014, an exchange of letters followed between the president of Kosovo and the EU on creating a specialized court in The Hague.

But Kosovo, which strongly opposed the court, had to agree, and did so only under relentless EU and U.S. pressure in mid-2015. A constitutional amendment allowing the creation of such a court had to be adopted, and then a law establishing it; both referred to the PACE resolution as justification for the court’s creation.

The court would deal only with former KLA members and not with Serb forces, creating distrust and dissatisfaction within Kosovar society from the outset.

The Specialist Chambers would have a hybrid character — part of Kosovo’s justice system, but at the same time internationalized. They began operating in The Hague in July 2017.

Thaçi, as foreign minister in 2015, initially backed the court; he later changed his stance and called its creation a “historic injustice.”

The Thaçi case

The case required three more years of investigations by the Specialist Prosecutor’s Office, led by U.S. prosecutor Jack Smith, before the indictment was finally filed in early November 2020.

In June of that year, Smith publicly announced, contrary to procedural rules, that an indictment was under review, just as Thaçi was traveling to Washington for a meeting with Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić and U.S. president Donald Trump. Thaçi returned to Kosovo and the meeting, which Trump had called historic, never took place.

The indictment charged Thaçi, who resigned as president, along with Veseli, Selimi and Krasniqi, with war crimes and crimes against humanity, including many of the crimes initially alleged in Marty’s report. It contained no reference to organ trafficking.

All four accused surrendered voluntarily to the court and were immediately placed in detention, where they have remained ever since — nearly six years. The perception that their detention is unjust has become one of the main rallying cries of Kosovo’s opposition to the Specialist Chambers, also fueling numerous recent protests across Europe.

Then followed another two and a half years of pre-trial proceedings, before the trial began on 3 April 2023 and ended on 18 February 2026, nearly three years later.

The prosecution must prove beyond reasonable doubt that the four defendants bear individual criminal responsibility for a series of grave crimes committed by their subordinates, as a result of “command responsibility” within a structured KLA hierarchy, and that they took part in a “joint criminal enterprise” aimed at silencing KLA critics in Kosovo and northern Albania, including around 100 murders.

The prosecution is seeking 45-year prison sentences for each of the defendants, who have all forcefully denied the charges.

The trial lasted 234 days and 134 witnesses were heard in the courtroom: 125 for the prosecution, two for the 156 victims and seven for the defense. In addition, 118 prosecution witnesses testified in writing.

The defense called its seven witnesses to rebut the prosecution’s claims about command responsibility and joint criminal enterprise, hoping to create reasonable doubt.

All were high-ranking officials with major reputations from the U.S. and Europe, with direct knowledge of the KLA during the war and its operations. U.S. General Wesley Clark, who led the NATO airstrikes that by June 1999 drove Serb forces out of Kosovo, testified in court, as did former U.S. assistant secretary of state James Rubin. Both stated that Thaçi was a political spokesman and not a military commander.

All these witnesses testified that the KLA was a loosely structured fighting force, made up of citizens who took up arms and built from the ground up, saying the defendants had no command responsibility and were not involved in any joint criminal enterprise.

But this extraordinary investment in time is not the only commitment.

By June 2025, the EU, as the court’s main funder, had spent around 400 million euros in financial support, while another 106 million euros were committed through June 2027 — a colossal financial investment, by any definition.

With 20 international judges, around a dozen prosecutors and approximately 280 international staff in support roles — none of them from Kosovo — the scale of this operation cannot be overstated.

The task of the trial panel

The task of the trial panel is to carefully assess all the evidence, determine the facts for each defendant and each charge, and reach a decision for each defendant and each charge. Given the complexity of the case and the extraordinary volume of evidence, this is a colossal task.

The presiding judge of the trial panel is Charles Smith III, from the U.S. state of Iowa, a highly experienced and reputable judge, and he is expected to discharge the court’s responsibilities with care.

The trial panel has several options: it may find all the accused guilty on all charges; guilty on some and not guilty on others; or not guilty on all charges. Decisions may also vary from one defendant to another and from one charge to another; the possible combinations are numerous.

The court has shown little tolerance toward the accused. Reading the trial panel’s decisions on continued detention, numbering 26 to 28 depending on the defendant, it is not hard to grasp the degree of distrust the trial panel has toward them.

For example, only on 10 August, Thaçi was again ordered to remain in detention (decision no. 28), as he was still considered likely to obstruct proceedings and commit other criminal offenses. Similar decisions have been made for the other defendants.