Police clash with Kosovo protesters over bid to curb Hague war crimes court

Police clashed with several hundred protesters outside Kosovo’s Parliament after lawmakers ended a session without completing a planned second vote on amendments to the Kosovo Specialist Chambers. Officers deployed tear gas and water cannon to disperse demonstrators, some of whom threw flares and firecrackers; authorities reported 12 people were injured, 11 of them civilians. The contested amendments would curb aspects of the Specialist Chambers’ authority by capping sentences at 15 years, enabling convicts to serve those sentences inside Kosovo, and allowing appeals of Chamber rulings to the country’s Supreme Court. The bill, sponsored by the main opposition Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK), had passed an initial reading earlier the same day but no final vote took place before Parliament adjourned. The push to amend the court is linked to public anger over convictions handed down in mid-September. On September 16, former president Hashim Thaci and three other former KLA commanders were found guilty of war crimes; Thaci received a 25-year sentence while his co-defendants were given terms ranging from 13 to 25 years. All four have denied the charges, and the convictions sparked weeks of protests and unanimous condemnation in Parliament in late September. The dispute over the Specialist Chambers has also become entwined with a constitutional timeline for Kosovo’s presidency. The Constitutional Court has set an October 6 deadline for electing a new president; failure to do so would dissolve Parliament and trigger another early election. The PDK has made its support for electing a president conditional on passage of the court reforms, while Prime Minister Albin Kurti’s Vetevendosje party prefers the presidential vote to proceed first and has criticised the speed and handling of the proposed amendments. The Specialist Chambers were established outside Kosovo in 2015 under pressure from Western partners, partly to reduce political interference and protect witnesses. Nonetheless the court remains deeply divisive domestically: many Kosovars venerate the Kosovo Liberation Army as the force that resisted Serbian repression and enabled independence, while the 1998–99 conflict that the court addresses left some 13,000 people dead and displaced about one million ethnic Albanians.