Prosecutor: EULEX Has Never Referred to Belgrade War Crimes Cases Involving Serbian Suspects

Vladimir Vukcevic(Photo: PrintScreen YouTube)

Serbia's first war crimes prosecutor, Vladimir Vukcevic, has described as untrue an allegation by a former judge of the European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo (EULEX) that a large number of war crimes cases involving Serbian nationals as suspects were referred to the judiciary in Belgrade.

Vukcevic said in an interview with the Danas newspaper, published on July 14, that "EULEX has never forwarded to Belgrade any war crime cases, because if it did, we would have surely processed those." The former prosecutor also said he didn't know Malcolm Simmons, the former EULEX judge who had made the allegation.

In a recent video address to the Parliament of Kosovo, Simmons recalled that the Serbian authorities had sentenced a single person in ten years, underlining that the Kosovo Specialist Chambers and the Specialist Prosecutor's Office, that is, a special court to try crimes committed by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), constituted a mechanism the European Union used as a solution in the Belgrade-Pristina dialogue.

EULEX, too, denied Simmons's allegations, saying that the Mission "has never forwarded a single war crimes case to Serbian judicary, nor rescinded authority over investigation documents and cases." The Mission stated that during a period of cooperation with the Serbian War Crimes Prosecution Office the EULEX kept all original war crimes trial documents, which, after their term in office expired, were submitted to Kosovo authorities.