Precedent in the Council of Europe: Rama wanted to overturn the resolution on the "Yellow House" at the beginning of the Thaci trial

Official Tirana is not giving up its attempt to overturn Dick Marty's report in the Council of Europe on human organ trafficking in Kosovo and Metohija and in Albania. Albanian Prime Minister, Edi Rama, announced yesterday, on the day of the start of the trial of KLA leaders, that signatures had been collected in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe for a new resolution, which would challenge Marty's document from 2011, in which the KLA had been accused of these crimes.

This kind of timing is not accidental, Kosovo Online interlocutors say, considering that the Marty report initiated the formation of the Specialized Court before which the leaders of the KLA are now being tried. They add that it would be a striking precedent if the Council of Europe annulled or revised the resolution it had adopted.

Former war crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic, who helped the most in drafting the Dick Marty report on the illegal trade in human organs in Kosovo and Albania, tells Kosovo Online that both in Tirana and Pristina, since the discovery of these crimes, they have been fighting with all means to refute and destroy Marty's report.

"As someone who worked on the investigation of these crimes, I claim that the report is well founded. We did the "Yellow House", we collected information on a total of 12 locations where the remains are located. I asked that we investigate this together with the Albanian authorities; they refused and then I turned to the Council of Europe. Dick Marty confirmed everything we found. Based on that, a specialized council for KLA crimes was formed," Vukcevic says.

Regarding the fact that human organ trafficking is not included in the indictment on which Hashim Thaci, Jakup Krasniqi, Rexhep Selimi, and Kadri Veseli are being tried, Vukcevic says that he does not know why this is so.

"There is also serious evidence of illegal trade in human organs in Albania and Kosovo," Vukcevic says.

Our interlocutor also points out that it is senseless for the Albanian parliament to interfere in the work of the court and to pass some kind of resolution that would challenge the report on the trade in human organs.

At the end of July 2022, the Assembly of Albania adopted a resolution requesting a review of the decision by which the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe adopted the report on organ trafficking. Albanian Prime Minister Rama spoke about this in front of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg last November, where he asked for the accusations of human organ trafficking to be dismissed and criticized the allegations in the book of the former chief prosecutor of the Hague Tribunal, Carla del Ponte, about the crimes of the KLA. The delegation of Serbia in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe then strongly reacted to Rama's statement.

The Vice-President of the Serbian Parliament and a member of our delegation in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Elvira Kovac, tells Kosovo Online that "it is not difficult to collect 20 signatures of deputies in the Assembly of the Council of Europe", which is necessary to launch an initiative.

"In order to submit a request to consider an initiative, 20 signatures are required, with the condition that it is initialed by members of at least several delegations, two political groups, and five countries. The procedure is such that their request then goes to the PACE Bureau, which decides what will happen to it. The Bureau can only take note of it and do nothing about it, or order that some information be prepared on the matter or possibly assign one of the committees the task of expressing an opinion on it," Kovac says.

She says that the next session of the PACE Bureau is scheduled for April 24 and believes that it is unlikely that Albania's request will be on the agenda that day. She reminds that based on Dick Marty's report on the trade in human organs, PACE adopted a resolution voted for by 169 MPs from 47 countries.

"It has never happened before that PACE reconsiders one of its resolutions. That would really be a precedent," Kovac says.

Lawyer Zoran Zivanović, a defense attorney in the trials against Serbs at the Hague Tribunal, tells Kosovo Online that the overturn of the Council of Europe resolution on human organ trafficking is an attempt by the Albanian state, on whose territory these crimes took place, to "remove the stain".

"On the other hand, this is an attempt to remove the stain from Kosovo as a 'state' that was founded on terrible crimes and whose 'freedom' was won by members of the KLA, who also committed foreign crimes," Zivanovic says.

He emphasizes that since the report of Marty was adopted by the Council of Europe and the recommendation was made that all countries cooperate on further research, the Albanian side and the Kosovo authorities have tried to invalidate those resolutions. Zivanovic adds that Dick Marty's report is quite exhaustive and that investigations were conducted on Albanian soil by independent authorities. He adds that in the document Marty described the places where the organs had been removed, the traces they had found, and various medical instruments, he cited the statements of the witnesses who had brought the victims.

"Unfortunately, for some reason, no evidence was found that directly links the leaders of the KLA to these crimes. They found people who transported the victims, transported the organs, but none of them wanted to reveal who the masterminds had been, even at the cost of being convicted themselves," Zivanovic says.