On 16 September, after almost six years of proceedings, the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague delivered its judgment against Hashim Thaçi, Kadri Veseli, Rexhep Selimi and Jakup Krasniqi. The verdict closes one of the most consequential judicial processes in Kosovo's post-war history. But it also raises a harder question: what does this verdict mean for the institution's legitimacy, and for Kosovo's already strained relationship with the EU and its Western partners? And notwithstanding the KSC’s attempt to differentiate between the individual responsibility of the convicted and the Kosovo Liberation Army, such a legal distinction does little to calm fears in Kosovo that the verdict calls the KLA's liberation character itself into question. The KLA was, after all, not only a liberation force but also a movement the international community itself treated as a partner when it intervened in the former Yugoslavia in 1999.
More than a decade ago, the United States and its European partners pressured Kosovo to establish a judicial mechanism to address allegations of crimes committed during and after the Kosovo war (1 January 1998 – 31 December 2000). The political pressure followed the 2011 report by Council of Europe rapporteur Dick Marty, which alleged grave crimes by members of the Kosovo Liberation Army. Kosovo was effectively confronted with a choice: accept a special mechanism rooted in Kosovo's constitutional framework but staffed and operated internationally, or risk the issue being taken to the United Nations, where Russia and China could have played a decisive role in shaping the process. The debate around the Chambers was therefore political as much as legal, a tension that has shadowed the institution from its inception.
What emerged is an institution unlike almost any other: formally part of Kosovo's judicial system, created through a constitutional amendment and Assembly legislation, yet located entirely in The Hague and staffed by international judges and prosecutors. It is neither a conventional domestic court nor a UN-style tribunal, but a hybrid built specifically for Kosovo, whose international judges are appointed by the Head of EULEX, several of them former EULEX staff themselves. That structure did not emerge in a vacuum. After the 1999 war, UNMIK exercised extensive legislative, executive and judicial powers in Kosovo; EULEX inherited much of the rule-of-law sector after independence and kept executive functions in sensitive criminal cases until 2018; and the ICTY had already tried a number of cases connected to the Kosovo war, including several KLA commanders such as Ramush Haradinaj (a sitting prime minister at the time) and Fatmir Limaj. In many ways, Kosovo has served as a laboratory for competing and overlapping models of international justice, each one layered onto the last. The Chambers, in other words, are the latest chapter in a two-decade, externally driven process of building Kosovo’s judiciary, and in particular its most sensitive part concerning transitional justice, under international authority, despite the Western partners’ insistence that the country needed independent, locally owned institutions.
That history shapes the legitimacy problem the Chambers face today. The institution grew out of the political controversy surrounding Marty's report, including allegations of organ trafficking that became central to public debate. Yet these allegations did not form part of the eventual indictment in the Thaçi et al. case, which instead brought ten counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. In its 16 September judgment, the Trial Panel found all four defendants guilty on four war-crime counts – arbitrary detention, cruel treatment, torture and murder – while acquitting them on all six counts of crimes against humanity. This gap between the final verdict and the original accusations adds to the controversy and further weakens the legitimacy of the institution and the process itself.
The reactions to the verdict laid bare the underlying grievances. Western governments and the EU called for the judgment to be respected, stressed individual criminal responsibility, and urged restraint and reconciliation – predictable and consistent positions. In Kosovo, the reaction has been far less settled. The governing majority expressed discontent and disappointment with the verdicts, amid protests which continue in Prishtina, with echoes among the Kosovo diaspora in parts of Western Europe. The opposition, notably the PDK, said it no longer trusts the court and announced it would bring legislation to the Assembly to amend the law governing the Chambers, pointing to concerns over sentencing and the limited oversight of the court itself. The details of the initiative are not yet clear, but the underlying message is: a significant part of Kosovo's political establishment does not accept the court's authority over its own legacy of state-building.
This verdict has landed amid ongoing political battles on several fronts in the country, deepening rather than resolving the divide between international justice and local ownership on the one hand, and between government and opposition on the other, despite the appearance of a united front in response to the verdict. The scale and intensity of the protests point to something deeper than anger at a single verdict: decades of unresolved war trauma, never properly processed through truth-telling, acknowledgement, or restitution, which found an outlet in the one moment the past forced its way back into public life. The reaction to this verdict shows how much of that dealing with the past remains undone and how exposed it leaves the region to Serbia's own revisionist push, on display just weeks earlier when Belgrade gave Ratko Mladić a hero's burial that drew thousands of mourners despite EU condemnation.
The Kosovo case points to a bigger challenge: Western post-conflict discourse on the Western Balkans has long treated transitional justice as part of reconciliation and Europeanization. Indeed, substantial European resources, nearly half a billion euros, have gone into the Specialist Chambers alone, on top of two decades of prior investment in Kosovo's rule of law through EULEX. Even though there should be no price tag on justice and the rule of law, that scale of spending on a single, externally run mechanism, without involving local actors and institutions, or allowing for the necessary processes of reflection and deliberation, raises real questions about how much local ownership of justice this investment actually produced. Furthermore, without renewed trust between Kosovo and the West, such investment may become another contested terrain in domestic political struggles.
That is a serious question for the EU. Brussels has invested enormous political and financial capital in Kosovo, and support for European integration there remains strong. Yet support for EU membership as an aspiration does not automatically translate into trust in European institutions and policies. Such a lack of trust may suit various political actors in Kosovo and elsewhere in the region. It does not, however, suit the EU itself at such a trying moment for its own security and resilience.
The Chambers risk becoming another symbol of that gap between aspirations and reality. Brussels cannot treat the verdict as a purely judicial matter whose political consequences will fade with time. Nor can calls for reconciliation, however sincere and important, substitute for addressing a decades-long legitimacy problem. Conversely, the Kosovo establishment cannot hide behind a defensive discourse and continue to avoid reflection upon the bigger questions of international engagement, governance and collective trauma.
The Chambers were born from a crisis of trust in Kosovo's own institutions. Their verdict now arrives amid another crisis of trust, this time between Kosovo and the international actors that have shaped so much of its post-war development. The judgment may close the first-instance phase of the judicial chapter. It does not close the political one.