Sunday, October 16, 2011

Should EULEX be abolished?

Last Thursday I attended a lecture by Johan van Vreeswijk who until last July was an EULEX prosecutor. As he made some fame as a crime fighter in Kosovo I had expected to hear a lot about how the rule of law is strengthened in Kosovo.

Instead he spent nearly the whole lecture defending the present escapades of EULEX and KFOR in the North of Kosovo. Unfortunately he is no expert in international law and he couldn't convince me. On criminal law - his expertise - he was very short: he expressed great confidence in his Albanian colleagues. It took a question from the public to have him say something about the Limaj case and then he only said that he regretted it that it took two years just to hear Limaj on his corruption charges due to dysfunction in the EULEX organization.

Obviously if the Albanians are doing so well it raises the question whether EULEX is still needed. My gut feeling was that EULEX is a complete failure and that they are now behaving like a third rate Balkan politician who has failed to improve the life of his voters and now uses nationalism as a cheap way to appear useful anyway.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Incredible! No comment on the Eulex-protected witness who recently "hung himself" in Germany?

If he thinks that's no significant problem, this indicts him as biased to the extreme, if not actually corrupt. And this is the organization expected to investigate and protect the witnesses of Dick Marty's KLA organ-trafficking allegations?