Hague Tribunal Convicts Former Kosovo President Thaçi of War Crimes, Sentences Him to 25 Years

The Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague convicted former Kosovo President Hashim Thaçi of war crimes on Wednesday and sentenced him to 25 years in prison, closing the trial-court phase of a case that has taken the hybrid tribunal more than eight years to bring to judgment. Three co-defendants, all former senior commanders of the Kosovo Liberation Army, were convicted alongside him and given sentences ranging from 13 to 25 years.

Presiding Judge Charles Smith read the verdict shortly after 10 a.m. local time in a judgment the court had scheduled weeks in advance, telling the courtroom that Thaçi had "used his position, leadership, authority and standing" to encourage crimes against political rivals and people the KLA regarded as collaborators or traitors, and that he had failed to investigate or discipline subordinates who carried them out. The judge said the panel's findings concerned individual criminal responsibility rather than "the legitimacy" of Kosovo's war for independence from Serbia.

Thaçi, Kadri Veseli, Jakup Krasniqi and Rexhep Selimi were tried together on charges covering the period from March 1998 to September 1999 in Kosovo and northern Albania. Each faced six counts of crimes against humanity and four counts of war crimes tied to what prosecutors described as a joint criminal enterprise that ran detention facilities where opponents of the KLA were held, beaten and in many cases killed. The panel convicted all four men on the war crimes counts — murder, torture, cruel treatment and arbitrary or illegal detention — but acquitted them on the crimes-against-humanity charges, finding that prosecutors had not proven the killings and detentions formed part of a widespread or systematic attack on the civilian population, the higher legal threshold those counts required.

According to reporting from the courtroom, Thaçi stood without visible reaction as the sentence was read. Thousands of supporters had gathered in Pristina's main square earlier in the day expecting an acquittal, with countdown displays set up in anticipation of Thaçi's release; the square emptied within minutes of the verdict, and a crowd outside the courthouse in The Hague briefly scuffled with Dutch police.

The numbers

The sentences handed down were:

• Hashim Thaçi, former KLA political director and Kosovo's president from 2016 to 2020: 25 years
• Jakup Krasniqi, former KLA spokesman and later speaker of Kosovo's parliament: 25 years
• Kadri Veseli, former head of KLA intelligence and later parliament speaker: 18 years, including time already served
• Rexhep Selimi, a former KLA commander and later member of parliament: 13 years, including time already served

Judges found the four men collectively responsible for the murder of 96 people identified as political opponents or suspected collaborators, along with the torture and arbitrary detention of hundreds more. The case itself has been vast by the standards of international justice: proceedings ran over 234 trial days between April 2023 and the close of evidence in December 2025, drawing on testimony from 134 witnesses — 125 called by prosecutors, two by victims' counsel and seven by the defence — plus 118 written statements, according to the court's own summary of the judgment. Closing arguments alone took nine days in February. All four defendants have been held at the court's detention unit since their arrests in November 2020, and that time counts toward the sentences imposed.

How we got here

The Kosovo Specialist Chambers is a hybrid court operating under Kosovo law with internationally appointed judges and prosecutors, created after a 2010-2011 Council of Europe inquiry led by Swiss senator Dick Marty accused senior KLA figures of arbitrary detentions, torture and other abuses committed both during the war and immediately after it, when Serbian forces withdrew and reprisals against people perceived as collaborators followed. Under pressure from the European Union and the United States, Kosovo's parliament amended the constitution in 2015 to establish the chambers, which are seated in The Hague to shield witnesses from a small country where the defendants remained hugely popular. The court began operating in 2017 and has cost roughly €500 million to run through mid-2027, according to court figures cited by detailed pre-verdict reporting on the tribunal's scale. The underlying 1998-99 war, in which Kosovo Albanians fought Serbian and Yugoslav forces, killed roughly 13,000 people and displaced hundreds of thousands before NATO's bombing campaign forced a Serbian withdrawal.

Who is affected, and the reaction

The verdict cuts directly at the founding narrative of Kosovo's statehood, in which the KLA is widely honoured as a liberation army rather than treated as a body whose leaders committed crimes against fellow Kosovo Albanians and Serbs. Kosovo's Foreign Minister, Glauk Konjufca, called it "a terrible judgment for Kosovo, for our people and for our liberation war," adding it was "a sad, unjust, undeserved decision," according to comments relayed from outside the courtroom. Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama posted a single word, "marre" — roughly "shameful" or "disgraceful" in Albanian — in response to the ruling.

"A terrible judgment for Kosovo, for our people and for our liberation war ... a sad, unjust, undeserved decision." — Glauk Konjufca, Kosovo's foreign minister

Serbian officials took the opposite view. Deputy Prime Minister Ivica Dačić described the convictions as a "warning" to Pristina and said they confirmed, in his telling, that the KLA had functioned as a "criminal and terrorist organisation," a characterisation Kosovo officials reject. Families of victims — both ethnic Albanians targeted as suspected collaborators and Serbs and Roma who say they were detained or killed by KLA units — have followed the case closely for years through victims' counsel represented at the trial, though few individual family reactions were available in the hours after the ruling. The verdict also lands awkwardly for the European Union, which brokers an on-and-off dialogue between Pristina and Belgrade and helped create the court in the first place, and which now faces accusations from Kosovo's political mainstream that Brussels indulged an unjust process against the country's own independence movement.

What happens next

All four men retain the right to appeal, and both defence teams and prosecutors — who had sought sentences of up to 45 years — are expected to challenge parts of Wednesday's ruling before the court's appeals panel, a process likely to take well over a year given the scale of the trial record. Thaçi faces a separate, still-pending case at the same court over allegations that he and others obstructed the tribunal's work by intimidating witnesses, which will proceed independently of Wednesday's judgment. In Kosovo, the ruling has already reopened a domestic political argument over whether the country should have accepted the court's jurisdiction in 2015, with several parties signalling they will press to limit or wind down its mandate once the current cases conclude. For now, Thaçi and his co-defendants remain in the tribunal's custody in the Netherlands while their lawyers prepare the appeals.