The Trial

Kosovo President Hashim Thaci said on Thursday that it was unacceptable that Ramush Haradinaj, a former guerrilla commander and prime minister who now leads the opposition Alliance for the Future of Kosovo, AAK, was arrested in France just because Serbia issued a warrant citing war crimes charges.

Artan Demhasaj, director of the Pristina-based NGO Cohu, said the increasingly routine decision of courts to close high-profile corruption trials to the public gaze will undermine faith in Kosovo in the justice system.

"While the courts are constantly closing such sensitive cases, it is causing a deterioration of the situation in terms of transparency," Demhasaj told BIRN.

The trial of the leader of the Alliance for a Better Future for Bosnia, SBBBiH, Fahrudin Radoncic, his party colleague, Bakir Dautbasic, Dautbasic's partner, Bilsena Sahman, and a former employee of the US embassy in Sarajevo, Zijad Hadzijahic, started on Wednesday.

The Slovenian justice ministry decided on Thursday that wartime Kosovo Liberation Army commander and former prime minister Haradinaj will not be extradited to Serbia, no matter what a Slovenian court decides to do about the arrest warrant accusing him of war crimes during the 1998-99 conflict.

Defence lawyers at the trial of a Kosovo Liberation Army cell accused of assaulting prisoners during the 1998-99 war said they believed the judges would not convict their clients.

A witness told the trial of the Kosovo Liberation Army’s ‘Drenica Group’ cell, accused of assaulting prisoners during the 1998-99 war, that her husband was beaten at a KLA jail.

PRISTINA – A panel of judges at the Basic Court in Pristina has begun the trial of Naser Keljmendi, charged by the Kosovo Special Prosecution Office with four crimes related to international drug trafficking and the murder of Ramiz Delilalic, a Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) citizen.

BELGRADE - The Serbian Office of the Prosecutor for War Crimes has welcomed the information by Tanjug that came from Brussels, which says that those from the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) indicted for the crimes listed in the report by Dick Marty will be tried in The Hague, and not in Pristina.