For years, Clint Williamson was largely absent from Kosovo’s increasingly fierce debate over the Specialist Chambers, while Dick Marty’s 2011 report became the principal target in efforts to challenge the foundations of the court. In the space of two days, however, the former chief prosecutor of the EU Special Investigative Task Force has returned to the centre of the discussion. Lawyer Tome Gashi invoked him on Tuesday; on Wednesday, Williamson himself spoke. His message is considerably different: the SITF findings largely tracked those later reached by the Specialist Chambers, Hashim Thaci, Kadri Veseli, Rexhep Selimi and Jakup Krasniqi were all part of his investigation, and, had he remained involved, Williamson says he believes investigators would have reached the same conclusion on the existence of a joint criminal enterprise.
Clint Williamson says he was not surprised by the September 16 first-instance verdict against four former senior Kosovo Liberation Army leaders.
In an interview published Wednesday by BIRN, the American lawyer who headed the European Union’s Special Investigative Task Force, SITF, also questioned how public expectations in Kosovo had been shaped ahead of the judgment.
“I don’t think much effort was made by authorities in Kosovo, or by those people who are commenting on this, to create expectations among people that it might be a little bit different than this single narrative that these individuals were going to be absolved and released,” Williamson said.
He went further, directly comparing the findings of his own investigation with those of the Specialist Chambers 12 years later.
The task force’s preliminary findings in 2014, he said, “largely tracked” with the judgment.
“We found that there had been a number of instances of inhumane treatment, of torture, and of murder that were directed at ethnic minorities in Kosovo as well as Kosovar Albanian political opponents of the KLA and of the accused that were recently convicted,” Williamson said.
Thaci and Krasniqi were sentenced in the first instance to 25 years in prison each, Veseli to 18 and Selimi to 13. They were convicted of war crimes including arbitrary detention, cruel treatment, torture and murder, while being acquitted of crimes against humanity. The judgment is subject to appeal.
Marty remained at the centre; Williamson largely disappeared
Since the verdict, Kosovo’s political and public debate has repeatedly returned to the 2011 Council of Europe report authored by Swiss senator Dick Marty.
Its allegations — particularly those concerning organ removal and trafficking — have been invoked as evidence by critics who argue that the process that eventually led to the Specialist Chambers was built on compromised or unproven claims.
Williamson’s investigation, however, stood between Marty’s report and the creation of the court.
The EU established the SITF in 2011 specifically to conduct an independent criminal investigation into the allegations contained in Marty’s Council of Europe report. Williamson headed the task force until 2014.
In July of that year, he announced that his team had found “compelling evidence” sufficient to file indictments against certain former senior KLA officials and that the SITF findings were “largely consistent” with the 2011 Council of Europe report.
Yet Williamson has barely figured in much of the debate that followed this month’s verdict.
A particularly striking example came last week.
Twenty-four representatives of academia, civil society, human-rights organisations and other public actors asked Kosovo Ombudsperson Naim Qelaj to consider referring key provisions of the Law on the Specialist Chambers to the Constitutional Court.
KoSSev reviewed the document in full. The Council of Europe’s Doc. 12462 — the Marty report — was cited eight times. Clint Williamson was not mentioned once. The SITF itself appeared only once, in a reference to the legal background.
That initiative emerged amid a much broader mobilisation against the September 16 judgment, including daily demonstrations, municipal declarations, initiatives to amend the law governing the Chambers and demands for institutional action.
The same omission was visible months earlier.
When Ombudsperson Qelaj presented a preliminary assessment critical of the Specialist Chambers in April — citing prolonged detention, restrictions on provisional release and what the document described as a possible deviation from the court’s original mandate — the analysis relied on Marty’s report but did not mention Williamson’s 2014 findings.
Gashi brings Williamson back into the debate
Williamson’s name returned prominently on Tuesday through lawyer Tome Gashi.
Gashi published a 2021 response from the Secretariat of the Kosovo Assembly concerning his request for Williamson’s “report”, arguing that MPs should never have approved the Law on the Specialist Chambers in 2015 without having that document before them.
The Assembly document does establish that the material requested by Gashi had not been attached to the draft law and was not in the Assembly’s possession when he requested it in 2021.
Gashi went further, however.
He claimed that Williamson, after investigating the allegations in Marty’s report, had found no evidence of human-organ trafficking and that the Williamson report had effectively “eliminated” that allegation.
As KoSSev reported on Tuesday, that characterisation does not match Williamson’s publicly announced findings from 2014.
Williamson did not say that the organ-trafficking allegations had been disproved.
What he said was that the evidence then available had not reached the evidentiary threshold required for an indictment.
At the same time, he said the SITF had found “compelling indications” that the practice had occurred on a very limited scale and that a small number of individuals may have been killed for the purpose of extracting and trafficking their organs.
In his 2014 presentation, Williamson expressly said that the task force had not dismissed the validity of the allegations.
He also stressed that the number of possible victims was very small — consistent with Marty’s own reference to a “handful” of cases — rather than the hundreds sometimes suggested in public debate.
In a subsequent interview with Koha Ditore, Williamson drew a distinction between saying there was “no evidence” and saying there was “not enough evidence” to bring charges.
What Williamson actually announced in 2014
The SITF was not established to reproduce Marty’s political report.
It was created to test its allegations through a criminal investigation.
By the time Williamson presented the findings in Brussels on July 29, 2014, the task force had interviewed hundreds of witnesses and reviewed thousands of pages of documentation.
The official statement on the SITF findings said investigators had found compelling evidence to indict certain former senior KLA officials and that their findings were largely consistent with Marty’s report.
Williamson listed alleged unlawful killings, abductions and disappearances, illegal detention in camps in Kosovo and Albania, sexual violence, other forms of inhumane treatment, forced displacement and the destruction of churches and other religious sites.
The alleged victims included Serbs, Roma and other minorities, as well as Kosovo Albanians perceived as collaborators with Serbia or as political opponents of the KLA leadership.
He also said the evidence indicated that these acts were not simply the conduct of isolated individuals acting independently.
The SITF had found evidence pointing to organised conduct and to responsibility extending to individuals at senior levels of the KLA leadership.
n 2020, Williamson told KoSSev the indictments were “a huge step forward”
Williamson also spoke directly to KoSSev in November 2020, shortly after the indictments against Hashim Thaci, Kadri Veseli, Rexhep Selimi and Jakup Krasniqi were confirmed.
In a statement to KoSSev, he described the confirmation of the indictments as “a huge step forward” in efforts to secure justice for victims of crimes committed during the 1998–99 conflict.
“The victims, including Serbs, Roma, other minorities in Kosovo, as well as Kosovo Albanians who were perceived to be political opponents of the accused, have waited patiently for years to see those who committed crimes against them held accountable,” Williamson told KoSSev at the time.
He also stressed the defendants’ right to a fair trial, saying that while the indictments were an important step, “the judicial process still has to play out and that will take time.”
Thaci, Veseli, Selimi and Krasniqi were all investigated
Williamson has now confirmed explicitly that all four men convicted on September 16 were among those investigated by his task force.
“Certainly Thaci, Veseli, Selimi and Krasniqi were part of our investigation,” he told BIRN, while noting that the SITF’s investigation extended beyond the four.
The Specialist Chambers ultimately convicted the four men for contributing to a joint criminal enterprise.
Williamson says the SITF had not reached that precise legal question during the period in which he led the investigation.
“We really did not get to this issue of joint criminal enterprise during the course of our investigation,” he said.
He then added:
“Had I continued to be involved after that point, I think we certainly would have come to the same conclusion that there was a joint criminal enterprise.”
“We were focused very much on the individual responsibility of potential perpetrators. But we did recognise that there was a common purpose that was at play here. There was certainly a high degree of cooperation and collaboration between these individuals.”
The statement comes only days after the finding of a common criminal purpose became one of the principal political points of contention surrounding the judgment.
PDK has already proposed major amendments to the Law on the Specialist Chambers, including narrowing the court’s competence to offences directly connected to the specific allegations in Marty’s report.
Kosovo’s Assembly has also debated a declaration challenging central elements of the September 16 judgment, while protests against the verdict have continued across Kosovo and abroad.
“This was not an indictment of the KLA”
Williamson also rejected the claim that the proceedings represented a judgment on the KLA as an organisation.
For nearly two weeks, demonstrators have protested under slogans including “Not In My Name”, following presiding judge Charles Smith III’s use of the phrase “in the name of the people of Kosovo” when announcing the judgment.
Smith emphasised that the trial was not about the legitimacy of the KLA or Kosovo’s struggle for independence.
Williamson made the same distinction.
“This was looking at the individual guilt of persons who had leadership roles in the KLA,” he told BIRN.
“As I said in 2014, as the court went to pains to explain, this was not an indictment of the KLA. This was not a judgment against the KLA as an organisation. This was a court that was set up to look at individuals who are in leadership positions, leadership roles.”
That position closely follows the one Williamson set out in Brussels in 2014.
At the time, he argued that criminal responsibility should attach to individuals and not to the KLA as a whole, while acknowledging that many people had joined the organisation believing they were fighting legitimately for Kosovo.
Why the court did not cover every crime committed in Kosovo
One of the most persistent criticisms of the Specialist Chambers in Kosovo is that the court has prosecuted former KLA members rather than functioning as a tribunal for all crimes committed during and after the Kosovo war.
Asked whether the Chambers might have enjoyed greater legitimacy had they not tried only former KLA fighters, Williamson rejected the premise that the institution had ever been designed to cover the full spectrum of crimes.
“This was not designed to be a court to look at every crime that was committed in Kosovo and nor was the ICTY. So this was in effect a continuation of the work that the ICTY was doing, but which was limited because of jurisdictional mandates. So for that reason, there was never any thought given to creating a court to deal with the wide range of cases.”
That argument, too, has roots in Williamson’s 2014 presentation.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia prosecuted senior Yugoslav and Serbian officials for crimes committed against Kosovo Albanians, but its practical and jurisdictional limits left a significant part of the post-war period outside the scope of its cases.
The SITF investigation emerged in that gap.
The Specialist Chambers were later established under Kosovo law in 2015, formally becoming part of Kosovo’s judicial system while operating in The Hague with international judges, prosecutors and staff.
A model for an era in which the UN Security Council no longer functions as it once did
Williamson, who previously served as a prosecutor at the ICTY, now works as lead coordinator of the Atrocity Crimes Advisory Group for Ukraine, a joint United States, United Kingdom and European Union initiative.
Looking beyond Kosovo, he told BIRN that the Specialist Chambers may represent one possible model for accountability mechanisms at a time when traditional international structures are increasingly difficult to establish.
International justice, he said, may increasingly have to work “through regional organisations, through partnerships between the international community and national governments”.
“There have been a lot of ups and downs,” Williamson said.
“We have seen a lot of international and hybrid and regional courts that have been created. I think right now it is a tough period for international justice.”
Future mechanisms do not necessarily have to resemble the Kosovo Specialist Chambers.
“Things like this will have to be crafted based on the particular circumstances in a given country with a given conflict.”
For Williamson, the Kosovo mechanism itself represented a precedent.
“The precedent here is that this was a rather innovative approach that had to be undertaken to put in place this justice process.”
The geopolitical environment in which the ICTY was created no longer exists.
Given what Williamson described as the current “high degree of dysfunctionality” in the UN Security Council, there is now, he said, “absolutely no consensus for any sort of accountability processes there or for much of anything else for that matter”.
The September 16 judgment against Thaci, Veseli, Selimi and Krasniqi is not final. The defendants may challenge both the convictions and sentences on appeal.
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