Kosovo Hopes Trials in Absentia Will Boost War Crimes Convictions

In another case dating from 1999, Bozur Bisevac, a Serb from Mitrovica, was charged with setting fire to houses, shooting at villagers and forcing them to flee their homes. In August 2000, Bisevac also escaped from jail, but the court continued to try him in absentia.

But then in January 2001, the head of the UN's mission in Kosovo, UNMIK, which at that time had executive and legislative power in the country, adopted a regulation prohibiting trials in absentia "for serious violations of international humanitarian law". After it came into force, the court abandoned the prosecution of Bisevac.

Ademi was jailed, and Bisevac was never arrested again.

UNMIK Regulation 2001/1 stated that "no person may be tried in absentia as defined in the applicable Yugoslav Criminal Code or the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court" that was issued in July 1998.

After 2009, almost all of UNMIK's regulations were repealed or superseded by proper laws, but trials in absentia were not included in Kosovo's legal framework.

Then in 2019, in an attempt to boost prosecutions of war crimes, the Kosovo Assembly adopted an amendment to the Criminal Procedure Code to allow trials in absentia in cases involving the offences against international humanitarian law and international criminal law that were committed between January 1990 and June 1999.

These were years in which Kosovo Albanians were struggling for liberation from Serbian rule, and the amendments were mostly intended to deal with cases of war crimes committed in Kosovo during the 1998-99 armed conflict.

Despite the changes, in the two years that followed, no one was prosecuted or convicted in absentia, and recently the Kosovo Assembly amended the Criminal Procedure Code again...