British professor and renowned lawyer Geoffrey Nice has said in an exclusive interview with T7 that, since the publication of the Dick Marty report, there have been indications that the Kosovo Specialist Chambers had a political dimension and political objectives.
Nice, a former prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia who prosecuted Slobodan Milošević, said he had followed the issue for around 15 years.
“First of all, I have been involved with this issue for about 15 years. Initially, I was not engaged by Kosovo at all, but completely independently, by a literary magazine, and I came to the conclusion that there was something surprising and perhaps political, rather than simply legal, about what was happening with the Marty Report, which you and your viewers may know something about,” Nice told T7.
He referred to the report presented to the Council of Europe, which alleged that Thaçi and others had been involved in the forcible removal of organs.
“From that moment, there were indications that this court was political, in the sense that it was driven by political objectives that were not clear,” Nice said.
Commenting on the judgment delivered against the former KLA leaders, Nice said he considered the publicly released summary insufficient for a detailed assessment of the evidence.
“The judgment announced yesterday is a summary. As an official document, it is not very useful, because the summary makes categorical assertions and does not identify specific evidence, for example, linking the accused to the crimes that the court says were proven,” he added in his interview with T7 journalist Elma Sylejmani.
Nice said more detailed analysis would require waiting for the full judgment, particularly because much of the evidence was presented in closed sessions.
“We will have to wait a long time for the redacted version of the full judgment, while the full judgment, because of the large amount of evidence presented in closed sessions, may not be available to the general public for decades, or perhaps even a hundred years. We simply do not know,” Nice said.
His comments come as the defence teams prepare to appeal the first-instance verdicts, with further proceedings expected to focus on the Trial Panel’s findings and the evidence underlying them.
