Opponents, not a people: what the Hague judgment found, and what it refused to find
Kosovo Dispatch Legal Desk | 16 September 2026
The Trial Panel found the attack. It found it was widespread. It found it was systematic. It found a plan behind it. Then it acquitted all four accused of every crime against humanity on the indictment.
That is the judgment the Kosovo Specialist Chambers pronounced on 16 September, and it turned on one element. The ICTY found that element against Belgrade and convicted. The Specialist Chambers could not find it against the KLA.
Crimes against humanity require an attack directed against a civilian population. In paragraph 41 of the Summary of Judgment, the Panel found that KLA members committed violence against civilians across Kosovo and in KLA-held areas of northern Albania between April 1998 and August 1999, that this violence amounted to an attack, and that the attack was both widespread and systematic. The Prosecution proved all of that. What it did not prove is that the attack was directed against a civilian population. Victims were "mainly and for some of them exclusively selected and targeted based on individualised considerations, rather than their membership in a targeted civilian population."
Fifteen years earlier, a different tribunal applied the same element to the other side of the same war. In Milutinović et al., the ICTY Trial Chamber found in 2009 that forces of the FRY and Serbia carried out a widespread and systematic attack directed against the Kosovo Albanian civilian population, that around 800,000 Kosovo Albanians were driven from the territory, and that a joint criminal enterprise sought through that campaign to alter the ethnic balance of Kosovo. Vlastimir Đorđević was separately convicted on the same basis. Persecution and deportation as crimes against humanity were the core of those convictions. The civilian population was the target, and the population was defined by ethnicity.
Paragraph 78 states who the KLA's victims were: people linked to the LDK and FARK who had not fully renounced those loyalties, people alleged to be associated with the Serbian authorities, and members of ethnic minorities, including a number of Roma and Serbs. Paragraph 6 puts the order plainly: crimes "against Serbs, Roma and, in particular, Kosovo-Albanians." The organising category was opposition to the KLA. The Panel traced it in paragraph 79 to pre-war assassinations of Albanians as suspected collaborators and Serbs as enemies or occupiers, claimed in KLA communiques. The Panel found a policy against people the leadership called opponents. The ICTY had found a policy against a people.
The Panel said as much about the war before it said anything about the crimes. Paragraph 5: "This case is not about the legitimacy of the Kosovo Liberation Army and its goal of an independent Kosovo." The same paragraph: "This case is not concerned with weighing the responsibilities of one side against those of the other. This case is not concerned with the crimes Serbian forces and paramilitaries undoubtedly committed against Kosovo-Albanians." Undoubtedly is the Panel's word. Paragraph 80: "It is not the goals that the Accused sought to achieve that rendered their acts criminal. It is the means." The dual objective of independence and political control was left undecided; the Panel said it did not need to rule on it. In its account of the background, it recorded the rescinding of Kosovo's autonomy in March 1989 and the adoption of discriminatory policies against the Albanian population.
All four were convicted of arbitrary detention of at least 385 people, cruel treatment of 49, torture of 303 and murder of 96, across 14 municipalities and two districts of northern Albania. Detainees in Llapushnik were "chained 'like animals'." A twelve-month-old infant was held for ten days in Malisheva with his mother. A seventy-year-old man was beaten until his face was smashed. Thaçi and Veseli personally took Behajdin Allaqi away in handcuffs from the Drenoc headquarters on or about 11 June 1998. He was never seen again. Communique 61 later declared him a martyr fallen in battle; the Panel called that a smokescreen and recorded post-war bribes offered to his family. The intelligence behind the arrests "was little more than unverified rumours." The Panel found no indication that any victim in the case was a spy or a collaborator. Someone with Serbian friends, a job in a Serbian company, or a loyalty to Rugova was enough.
Counts 1, 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 fell. Persecution and enforced disappearance existed only as crimes against humanity, so there are no convictions for either. Torture and murder survive as war crimes. War crimes require an armed conflict, and the Panel dated it: end of March 1998 to on or around 20 June 1999. Paragraph 44 then draws a second line. Incidents beginning after 20 June 1999 "could not qualify as war crimes" because humanitarian law had ceased to apply. The indictment ran to September 1999. Nothing charged for that summer produced a conviction, and nothing about Kosovo after the armed conflict is a finding of criminal responsibility in this judgment.
Seven other men were found to have shared the criminal purpose: Lahi Brahimaj, Fatmir Limaj, Sylejman Selimi, Rrustem Mustafa, Latif Gashi, Shukri Buja and Sabit Geci. No guilt was found against them and the Panel said they remain presumed innocent. Reparations are pending before the same Panel. Both sides may appeal; the Prosecution had sought 45 years.
Thaçi and Krasniqi received 25 years, Veseli 18, Selimi 13, with credit for time served. For Thaçi, murder carried 23 years and torture 20. Those are the sentences for what the KLA leadership did to its own opponents. They are not a finding about what Kosovo was fighting.
