International mistakes in Bosnia and Kosovo

The international community makes mistakes. Today has brought to my attention two of them:

1. The Bosnia High Representative, Christian Schmidt, is in the news because he is (thankfully) quitting.
2. The Kosovo Specialist Chambers (KSC) trying former Kosovo President Hashim Thaci and other leaders of the Kosovo Liberation has gotten some comeuppance in a British report.

The HiRep

Schmidt has done some good things. In 2023, he promulgated the law that got the erstwhile leader of the Serb-dominated half of Bosnia indicted and convicted for defying HiRep decisions. But he also made a hash of Bosnia’s electoral system with a 2022 decision. That changed how votes should be counted after an election. And the international community allowed him to blatantly favor Croatian interests and oppose a decision in the European Court of Human Rights. That would have put Bosnia on the road to instituting equal individual rights rather ethnically defined group rights.

Now the question will be what happens with his job. Many Europeans want to abolish it. They want to transfer responsibility for ensuring Bosnia’s future as a state to the EU accession process. That ultimately may be the right solution, but it won’t suffice at present. The HiRep’s dictatorial powers have proven essential for the Dayton peace accords to work for more than 30 years. Before abolishing his job, Bosnia will need a constitution that ensures the state’s future as well as enabling it to accede to the EU.

I might have suggested in the past that an American be named HiRep. But I doubt that is wise at present. The Trump Administration has already shown its cards by de-sanctioning of Bosnia’s leading ethnic nationalist, Milorad Dodik. The quid pro quo for that seems to be a whopping contract to some Trump cronies for a gas pipeline. Giving dictatorial powers in Bosnia to a transactional American administration would be madness.

I suppose it might happen. But it would end Bosnia’s EU hopes and put it at risk of losing its bid for EU membership. Of course there are also Europeans who might do the same, in particular if they set out to please Dodik and Moscow.

The Specialist Chambers

I have already done a mea culpa for my minor part in urging the Kosovars to create the Specialist Chambers that indicted the KLA leaders five years ago.

Now the Kosovo Ombudsperson has published a “Preliminary Report on the Kosovo Specialist Chambers” prepared by the Bar Human Rights Committee of England and Wales (BHRC). I am not a lawyer. And this report is far too intricate and detailed to do justice to in a blog post.

But if I understand it correctly, it raises serious questions about the KSC in the following domains:

1. Provisional release;
2. The right to a competent, independent, and partial tribunal established by law;
3. Admissibility of evidence (especially but not only evidence provided by the Serbian government);
4. The principle of equality of arms (that is, between the prosecutor and the defense);
5. The principle of legality.

The report concludes that its “temperature check” reveals “preliminary concerns serious enough to demand attention and documented enough to resist dismissal.” It reaches this judgment against the standards of the Kosovo constitution and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). The report also notes the potential impact on “the still fragile architecture of peace and stability in the region.” Then it concludes recommends independent monitoring trial monitoring.

What it does not say is that a court costing the international community a couple of hundred million euros has failed to deliver justice that meets the standards the people of Kosovo require. The remedy for this is unclear to me. But conviction and further imprisonment is not going to improve the reputation of international justice anywhere but in Serbia.