In his outgoing address as Kosovo Specialist Prosecutor, David Schwendiman said that gathering evidence and locating witnesses to indict former members of the Kosovo Liberation Army had been tough.
In his parting speech, the chief prosecutor at the Hague-based Kosovo Specialist Chambers, David Schwendiman, said on Thursday that his office had collected a mass of evidence – but repeated that the court was not set up to “change history” or put one ethnicity on trial.
During his time in the job, his office collected around 700,000 p ages of documents, some 6,000 videos, transcripts and other items during investigations of possible war crimes, Schwendiman said.
The documents and items are now being evaluated to determine their value as evidence, Schwendiman told the Grotius Centre of Leiden University in The Hague.
“We must do it right and do it well to ensure that we meet the standard… and avoid significant delays… later on,” he said in his last address before retiring on March 31.
Schwendiman said that the Specialist Prosecutor is also responsible for helping victims achieve the rights guaranteed to them.
That included “the obligation to reasonably investigate the death and disappearance of victims of the crimes within the mandate of the Specialist Prosecutor, and to locate, exhume and identify those still missing, so they can be given back their identity and returned to those who survived them,” Schwendiman said.
Countering widespread criticism of the court in Kosovo itself, he added that the work of the Specialist Prosecutor and Specialist Chambers was not an attack on a “historical narrative such as the Kosovo independence narrative or the Kosovo Liberation Army veterans’ narrative”.
The aim was not “to change history, or to attack a narrative, or an organisation, or a group, or ethnicity. Our sole objective is to do what the law and the evidence allow us to do to put people to proof for their own acts,” Schwendiman said.
“If organisations to which individuals belonged or which they controlled or directed are discredited, it is the crimes of the individuals taken together or alone that are the cause, not the act of investigating or prosecuting them,” he added.
Schwendiman expressed disappointment that he would not be able to finish his work, as he is retiring, but called his departure “a personnel change … not a change in US policy”. Kwai Hong Ip, Schwendiman’s deputy, will be taking over as acting Specialist Prosecutor.
Schwendiman was appointed in 2016 as Specialist Prosecutor. Previously, he led the EU Special Investigative Task Force, SITF, which probed alleged crimes by the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, in the 1999 war after which the former Serbian province became independent.
The Specialist Chambers will hear cases arising from the 2014 SITF report, which said that unnamed KLA officials carried out a “campaign of persecution” against Serbs, Roma and some Kosovo Albanians. Alleged crimes include killings, abductions, illegal detentions and sexual violence.
The SITF report was commissioned after the Council of Europe published an inquiry in 2011 which alleged that some senior Kosovo officials, including the current President, Hashim Thaci, were responsible for various human rights abuses. Thaci has denied the allegations.
International judges and prosecutors staff the new court, although it operates under Kosovo’s laws. Negotiations to establish the court lasted from 2011 until 2015.
Since the war in Kosovo ended in the late 1990s, the international community has been involved in the justice system in Kosovo, but results have been modest; fewer than 20 final verdicts in war-crimes cases.
It was believed that the Kosovo courts could not or would not handle sensitive cases against senior ex-KLA officials, which is why the international community decided to establish the new court.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
