EU justice mission exits Kosovo under flak

Eulex’s decade-long mandate doesn’t quite match up for many given conviction rate

As an EU judicial mission prepares to leave Kosovo, the assessments of its decade-long mandate are mixed — hailed by officials but criticised by the public.

The EU’s rule of law mission (Eulex) that will cease its judicial operations on June 14 was set up in December 2008, 10 months after Kosovo unilaterally declared independence from Serbia.

Spending several hundred million euros over the decade, hundreds of judges and police officers served with Eulex, the political bloc’s largest civilian mission ever. They were dealing with some of the most serious crimes committed during and after Kosovo’s 1998-1999 war between ethnic Albanian guerillas and Serb forces, the fight against corruption and organised crime as well as boosting citizen confidence in the judiciary.

“I have every reason to be dissatisfied with Eulex,” said 46-year-old Silvana Marinkovic, an ethnic Serb.

Her husband Goran was abducted in the aftermath of the war and his fate, like those of about 1,600 other people, still remains unknown.

Kosovo’s war claimed 13,000 lives. But Eulex eventually solved only 25 war crimes cases, according to the Humanitarian Law Centre rights watchdog. “Despite systematic rape numbering thousands of victims committed by the Serbian security forces, there was no one single case solved and perpetrator punished,” it said in a statement.