Defence, Prosecution Argue Over Witness Protection at Kosovo War Court

Judges Fergal M. Gaynor, Guenael Mettraux, Charles L. Smith III and Christoph Barthe in court for the trial of former Kosovo President Hashim Thaci in The Hague, April 2023. Photo: EPA-EFE/Koen van Weel/Pool.

Former Kosovo President Hashim Thaci’s defence lawyer Gregory Kehoe told the Kosovo Specialist Chambers at a status conference in the trial on Tuesday “there is no tribunal that has put measures” in place for witness protection like the ones being imposed at his client’s trial in The Hague.

Kehoe claimed that “several of the witnesses in this list [of protected witnesses] never asked for it”.

The defence in the war crimes and crimes against humanity trial of Thaci and three other former senior Kosovo Liberation Army officers has repeatedly complained that overzealous witness protection measures have impeded its ability to make it case properly.

Most of the hearings in the trial have been held in private sessions to safeguard witnesses’ identity for fear of possible retribution.

But victims’ counsel Simon Laws, the lawyer representing the victims in the trial, said that the witnesses “believe they are putting themselves in harm’s way” by testifying.

Laws added that “publicity is important but cannot be the trump card, without the participation of the witnesses, there wouldn’t be a trial to broadcast publicly at all”.

The prosecution insisted meanwhile that it is fulfilling its obligation to ask witnesses whether or not they want to testify in private or in public.

Ben Emmerson, the lawyer for Thaci’s co-defendant, former Kosovo parliamentary speaker Kadri Veseli, claimed however that since the start of the proceedings in this case, “there have been no threats against the witnesses”.

Emmerson also said that “a number of witnesses heard have testified publicly in court in domestic proceedings [in Kosovo]”.

Presiding judge Charles Smith also described the prosecution’s approach as “unusually conservative”, saying that “the sessions should be as public as possible”.

Witness protection has been a key concern for the Kosovo Specialist Chambers from the outset.

The Specialist Chambers were set up in 2015 by the Kosovo parliament, acting under pressure from Kosovo’s Western allies, who said Kosovo’s own justice system was not robust enough to try KLA cases and protect witnesses from intimidation. Previous trials at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal were marred by witness-tampering.

Thaci and his three co-defendants are on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity, allegedly committed between at least March 1998 and September 1999, during and just after the war in Kosovo with Serbian forces.

They are accused of having individual and command responsibility for crimes that were mainly committed against prisoners held at KLA detention facilities in Kosovo and neighbouring Albania, including 102 murders. They have pleaded not guilty to all charges.

On Monday, the tenth witness in the trial, an ethnic Serb, testified that he had been detained and tortured by the KLA for two months.

The witness claimed that he had received 200,000 dinars (around 1,700 euros at the current exchange rate) from Serbia for what he endured during his detention, and that he had informed the Serbian authorities at the time about the types of weapons the KLA fighters had, and about their location.