Date Set for Haradinaj Partial Retrial
New proceedings stalled for several months due to long awaited appeals decision on their scope.
Date Set for Haradinaj Partial Retrial
New proceedings stalled for several months due to long awaited appeals decision on their scope.
The partial retrial of ex-Kosovo prime minister Ramush Haradinaj will commence in August, a judge announced during a status conference on June 9.
A pre-trial conference will be held on August 17, with opening statements the following day. The presentation of evidence will begin immediately thereafter.
Haradinaj was acquitted in 2008 of all 37 counts against him, which included the murder, torture and rape of Serb civilians as well as of suspected Albanian and Roma collaborators during the late Nineties conflict in Kosovo.
One of his co-accused, Idriz Balaj, was also acquitted at that time, while a third co-accused, Lahi Brahimaj, was found guilty of cruel treatment and torture and sentenced to six years in prison.
Prosecutors appealed against the acquittals, claiming that the trial had been “infected” by witness intimidation. As a result of this, they said, they were unable to secure the testimony of two key witnesses.
In late July of last year, appeals judges ruled that all three accused should face a partial retrial on six counts of murder, cruel treatment and torture.
The appeals chamber found that the trial judges “failed to appreciate the gravity of the threat of witness intimidation posed to the trial’s integrity” and placed too much emphasis “on ensuring that the prosecution took no more than its pre-allotted time to present its case…irrespective of the possibility of securing potentially important testimony”.
The partial retrial has been stalled for several months due to a long awaited appeals decision on the scope of the proceedings.
While Haradinaj’s team has maintained that the retrial should be limited to the two witnesses who refused to testify the first time around, the prosecution has indicated that it intends to call new witnesses and also enter evidence from the original trial.
When the bench stated last January that the order for partial retrial didn’t place any limits on what evidence the prosecution might present, Haradinaj’s team appealed, arguing that the prosecution was seeking to embark on an “open ended retrial”.
On May 31, the appeals chamber rejected Haradinaj’s appeal in its entirety.
Rachel Irwin is an IWPR reporter in The Hague.
