The convictions of Hashim Thaçi and three other former KLA leaders have shaken Kosovo. But beyond the sentences, the verdict has intensified scrutiny of how the Specialist Chambers were created, how the trial was conducted and whether an institution established under strong Western pressure can command the legitimacy international justice requires.
Tirana Times, September 16, 2026 — Four men who helped lead Kosovo’s armed struggle against Serbian rule and later occupied some of the highest offices of the new state were given decades in prison on Wednesday, in a judgment certain to reverberate far beyond the courtroom in The Hague.
Former Kosovo President Hashim Thaçi and former Assembly Speaker Jakup Krasniqi were each sentenced to 25 years. Kadri Veseli, another former parliamentary speaker, received 18 years, while Rexhep Selimi was sentenced to 13. The Kosovo Specialist Chambers convicted them of war crimes involving illegal or arbitrary detention, cruel treatment, torture and murder. The judgment is at first instance and can be appealed.
The Trial Panel said the four contributed significantly to what it described as a “common criminal purpose” targeting people perceived as opponents of the Kosovo Liberation Army, including alleged collaborators with Serbian authorities and political rivals.
But the judges also rejected a central and more sweeping element of the prosecution case. All four were acquitted of the charges of crimes against humanity because prosecutors failed to establish that the crimes formed part of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population.
That distinction is fundamental.
The court explicitly stressed that it was not judging the legitimacy of the KLA, Kosovo’s struggle for liberation or its goal of independence. Serbia’s Ivica Dačić nevertheless quickly portrayed the verdict as confirmation that the KLA had been a criminal and terrorist organisation. The court itself made no such finding, saying the case concerned the acts and conduct of the individual accused.
Yet the most difficult questions raised by Wednesday’s judgment may concern not only what the judges decided, but also the judicial process that produced the decision.
Prosper challenges the foundations of the case
Pierre-Richard Prosper, Thaçi’s lawyer and a former U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, delivered one of the strongest reactions to the judgment.
He described the ruling as a “travesty of justice” and a “dark day for international justice,” argued that the result appeared predetermined and announced that the defence would appeal.
His criticism went considerably beyond disagreement over the severity of Thaçi’s sentence.
The defence presented testimony from senior Western officials who had direct contact with the KLA leadership during the war, including former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark and former senior U.S. officials James Rubin and Christopher Hill.
Prosper argues that their testimony presented a substantially different picture of the KLA’s wartime structure and of Thaçi’s actual authority from the one advanced by prosecutors.
That question could become central during the appeal.
If senior diplomats and military commanders who dealt personally with Thaçi during the war described a much less centralised KLA leadership, the appellate judges will have to examine closely how the Trial Panel weighed that evidence against the prosecution’s theory of criminal responsibility.
Prosper also raised a larger historical question: how should the prosecution’s construction of an organised criminal project involving senior KLA figures be reconciled with the fact that the United States and NATO dealt directly with those same leaders during the war and its immediate aftermath?
Western engagement with the KLA cannot, of course, provide immunity from individual criminal responsibility. But it makes the court’s assessment of wartime authority, hierarchy and control particularly important.
Prosper’s most politically resonant criticism came when he challenged the court’s use of the phrase “in the name of the people of Kosovo.”
He argued that an institution based in the Netherlands, composed entirely of international judges and viewed with deep scepticism by much of Kosovo’s population could hardly claim to speak politically in the name of that population.
Formally, the Specialist Chambers are courts of Kosovo.
Politically, the reality is far more complicated.
Questions over fair trial preceded the verdict
The concerns surrounding the court did not begin after Wednesday’s convictions.
Earlier this year, the independent Bar Human Rights Committee of England and Wales published a preliminary review of the Specialist Chambers commissioned by Kosovo’s Ombudsperson.
The report did not conclude that the Thaçi proceedings were unlawful or that the defendants had been denied a fair trial. Indeed, it described the court’s formal legal framework as broadly robust and, in many respects, compatible with international human rights standards.
But it also identified a series of areas requiring serious scrutiny.
These included prolonged pretrial detention, questions surrounding the use and provenance of evidence, mechanisms for challenging judicial decisions, materials originating outside Kosovo and possible resource and procedural imbalances between prosecution and defence.
Particular attention was given to equality of arms — the principle that neither side in a criminal proceeding should be placed at a substantial disadvantage in presenting its case.
For an institution exercising such extraordinary power, these concerns cannot be considered technical details.
A criminal court is judged not only by whether it punishes wrongdoing but also by whether defendants are given a genuine opportunity to confront the case against them under procedures that are transparent, balanced and demonstrably fair.
The Specialist Chambers have disputed some interpretations of the report and have stressed the existence of judicial remedies, including appeal.
That response is significant. But the sentences imposed Wednesday make the questions raised by independent legal experts more important, not less.
Nice: the problem of how the court was created
Sir Geoffrey Nice KC, the British lawyer who prosecuted Slobodan Milošević before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, has raised a different but equally fundamental question: how freely did Kosovo establish this court?
Nice has argued that describing the Specialist Chambers simply as a sovereign decision of Kosovo’s parliament leaves out the intense pressure exercised by the United States and European Union.
According to Nice, Kosovo’s representatives were placed in a position where rejection of the court was politically extremely difficult. He has questioned whether Kosovo was genuinely able to shape the institution or whether the essential architecture had already been determined by international actors.
Nice has also raised concerns about the perception created by a tribunal whose prosecutions have overwhelmingly focused on former members of the KLA, while the vast majority of documented crimes committed against Kosovo Albanians were carried out by Serbian and Yugoslav state forces.
Importantly, Nice does not claim to have followed the detailed evidence in Thaçi’s trial closely enough to pronounce on the individual guilt or innocence of the four defendants.
His argument is institutional.
And that distinction matters.
The question he raises is whether a court created under extraordinary international political pressure carries a legitimacy deficit from its inception — and whether that deficit therefore places an even heavier responsibility on the institution to demonstrate impeccable fairness, transparency and independence.
Washington’s uncomfortable paradox
The judgment also leaves Washington confronting an uncomfortable historical paradox.
The KLA emerged after years of Serbian repression of Kosovo Albanians. As the conflict escalated, hundreds of thousands of civilians were expelled or displaced. NATO launched its air campaign against Yugoslavia in March 1999, and the United States became deeply involved in the diplomatic and military process that ended Serbian control over Kosovo.
American and NATO officials dealt directly with KLA leaders, including Thaçi.
Today, Washington says it respects the Specialist Chambers’ judgment and has urged all parties to respect the decision, avoid inflammatory rhetoric and continue working towards a peaceful and democratic future.
Those positions are not legally contradictory. A government may support a liberation struggle while still insisting that individuals who commit crimes during that struggle be held accountable.
But the history makes the political implications of the judgment much more complicated.
Daniel Serwer, the veteran American Balkan analyst, put the contradiction in particularly stark terms after the verdict. Americans and Europeans, he argued, should feel ashamed because they had “criminalized a liberation movement they supported.”
Serwer criticised not only the judgment but the institutional concept behind the court, although he also warned that angry reactions in Kosovo should remain peaceful.
His language is political rather than judicial. But it captures a dilemma now facing Kosovo and its Western partners.
The court says it has judged four individuals, not the KLA.
Yet when four of the most important political and military figures associated with a liberation movement are convicted under a theory of common criminal purpose, the line between individual responsibility and the historical interpretation of the movement itself becomes extremely sensitive.
The Kosovo war cannot be put on trial
That is particularly important because the historical context of the Kosovo war is not in serious dispute.
The KLA arose in circumstances of increasing Serbian repression. Kosovo Albanians had been stripped of autonomy, excluded from institutions and subjected to political repression long before the armed conflict reached its peak.
During 1998 and 1999, Serbian and Yugoslav forces carried out mass expulsions, killings, persecution and other serious crimes against the Albanian population.
NATO eventually intervened militarily.
None of that means crimes committed by individual members of the KLA should be ignored or excused. Liberation movements are bound by the laws of war just as state forces are.
But individual criminal responsibility and the historical character of a liberation struggle are not the same question.
The court itself recognised this distinction when it stressed that the legitimacy of the KLA and Kosovo’s struggle for independence were not on trial.
That principle will now need to survive the political consequences of the judgment.
The appeal will also put the court to the test
The appellate proceedings will therefore carry significance far beyond the sentences of the four men.
They will have to examine the prosecution’s theory of criminal responsibility, the evidence concerning the KLA’s command structure, the actual authority of the defendants and the treatment of defence testimony.
But the appeal will inevitably become something more.
The Specialist Chambers will also face the accumulated questions raised by Prosper about the conduct and evidentiary foundations of the trial, by Nice about the political circumstances surrounding the court’s creation, and by independent legal experts about equality of arms, evidence and procedural safeguards.
International criminal justice cannot draw authority solely from the gravity of the crimes it prosecutes.
Its legitimacy depends just as fundamentally on how justice is administered.
Victims deserve accountability. But defendants are also entitled to a process whose fairness can withstand rigorous examination, especially when convictions result in decades of imprisonment.
The Kosovo war cannot be reduced to this trial. Serbian repression, mass displacement, NATO’s intervention and the liberation of Kosovo remain part of the historical record. So too, according to the Trial Panel, are victims of detention, torture and killings for which the judges found the defendants criminally responsible.
Those realities do not have to cancel each other out.
What international justice must avoid is allowing individual criminal responsibility to become collective historical guilt.
For Thaçi, Krasniqi, Veseli and Selimi, the appeal concerns decades of their lives.
For the Specialist Chambers, however, something broader is now at stake: whether a deeply contested institution can demonstrate convincingly that it has delivered not simply convictions, but justice through a process that was independent, balanced and fair.
For international criminal justice, that may ultimately prove to be the more consequential verdict.
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