Petronijevic: Pristina’s unprincipled stance; Serbian archives contain exceptionally high-quality documentation

Lawyer Goran Petronijevic told Kosovo Online that the complaints by Pristina officials about the Specialized Chambers in The Hague accepting as evidence documents provided by Serbian authorities, while at the same time Pristina demands the opening of Serbian archives in resolving the issue of missing persons, reveal double standards by the Kosovo authorities and an unprincipled stance.

“If you believe in what suits you but do not believe in what goes against you, that is a completely, I would say, distorted way of thinking. You cannot declare certain documents from Serbian state bodies valid and others invalid. They are either valid or invalid from your perspective. Whether and how they will be used will be decided by the court,” Petronijevic emphasizes.

Regarding the statement by Kosovo’s acting Minister of Justice Albulena Haxhiu that accepting materials submitted by Serbian state institutions as reliable sources represents a serious distortion of justice, Petronijevic says that this is a “completely subjective story” and that Haxhiu is positioning herself as a defender.

According to him, the Serbian archives contain exceptionally high-quality documentation.

“A large part of it was already handed over to the Hague Tribunal in the trial against Ramush Haradinaj and several other members of the KLA. I don’t know whether in this case it is that documentation, perhaps taken from the Hague Tribunal, or documentation obtained directly from our state bodies. Whether it concerns military, police, judicial, state, or even private documents, these are exceptionally quality pieces of evidence and every court must evaluate them,” Petronijevic asserts.

Thoughts about whether those documents can be evidence or not, he adds, represent a kind of “escape from reality by the institutions of self-declared Kosovo, especially the Minister of Justice.”

“She should be the first to care that those Albanians and the families of those Albanians who were killed receive justice or satisfaction. This is an unfair attitude, not only towards Serbia and Serbs, but also towards her own people and a kind of irresponsibility towards her own people. The documentation is certainly good and of quality, and I am almost certain that there is no court that will reject such documentation,” Petronijevic says, reminding that the charges before the Specialized Chambers in The Hague mostly relate to events in which Albanians were the primary victims.