Kosovo erupts over war crimes court as protesters clash with police

On a Monday afternoon in central Pristina, the streets outside Kosovo's parliament and government buildings became a battleground. Demonstrators hurled stones and firecrackers at police guarding the entrances while officers responded with tear gas and water cannons, leaving at least seventeen people injured—six of them police—and three protesters in custody. The clash erupted over a piece of legislation that had just cleared its first parliamentary hurdle: a set of amendments designed to strip power from the Kosovo war crimes court operating in The Hague.

The timing was no accident. Weeks earlier, that same court had convicted Hashim Thaci, Kosovo's former president, of war crimes including murder, torture, and illegal detention. Thaci received a twenty-five-year sentence. Three co-defendants were convicted alongside him, their combined sentences totaling eighty-one years. All four have appealed. For many Kosovars, Thaci and the other defendants were not criminals but fighters—commanders of the Kosovo Liberation Army during the 1998-99 war against Serbia—and the court's verdicts felt like a betrayal of the nation's own struggle for independence.

The proposed amendments reflected this anger. If passed, they would cap prison sentences at fifteen years instead of allowing longer terms, permit defendants to appeal verdicts to Kosovo's own Supreme Court rather than accepting the international court's finality, allow sentences to be served within Kosovo rather than abroad, and grant Kosovo's president the power to offer amnesty to the convicted. These changes would fundamentally reshape how the court operates and what its convictions mean.

Parliament had approved the first reading of the amendments earlier that day. But when lawmakers attempted to leave the chamber, demonstrators blocked their exit, demanding an immediate second vote—the step required to actually pass the legislation. The confrontation that followed was visceral: police in riot gear, crowds throwing projectiles, chemical agents filling the air. Three people were detained as the standoff unfolded.

Prime Minister Albin Kurti, whose government holds significant parliamentary power, offered a cautious response. He told parliament that the amendments felt rushed and poorly considered, lacking the depth of analysis such consequential changes deserved. Despite this skepticism, Kurti's party had voted yes on the first reading. But when the second vote came—or was supposed to come—Kurti and his coalition declined to support it. The amendments had been introduced by the Democratic Party of Kosovo, the party Thaci once led, and Kurti appeared unwilling to hand them a legislative victory on the same day.

The Specialist Chambers itself was established in 2015, created under international pressure to prosecute ethnic Albanian KLA fighters for alleged crimes during and after the war. For a decade, the court operated with broad authority and little domestic political interference. Now that authority was under siege. The clash outside parliament revealed the depth of the divide: between those who saw the court as essential accountability and those who saw it as a foreign instrument punishing national heroes. It also exposed fractures within Kosovo's own government, where even allies disagreed on how far to go in limiting the court's reach.

As the tear gas cleared and the injured were treated, the second vote remained uncertain. The amendments had momentum but also resistance. What was clear was that Kosovo's reckoning with its own war—and with the people who fought it—remained unresolved, and the battle over how to prosecute that history was far from over.