US Judge’s Memoir Delivers Verdict on Justice in Kosovo

Pineles came to Kosovo after serving as a judge for 21 years in the US and then working as a legal adviser in the former Soviet states of Kazakhstan and Georgia.

In his description of his experiences during more than two years in Kosovo, he depicts the stagnation of the country's justice system, with court cases dragging on for years. One of these was the other major trial in which Pineles served as a EULEX judge, the Medicus organ-trafficking case.

Pineles believes that the case was legally significant because it was “one of the first cases in the world where the medical doctors were actually on trial [for alleged organ-trafficking] as opposed to facilitators and middle men”.

Police initially raided the Medicus clinic in Pristina in 2008 after a Turkish man whose kidney had been removed was found seriously ill at the airport. It was suspected that donors were being brought to the clinic after being promised they would receive up to 15,000 euros for their kidneys, which would then be sold to wealthy foreigners for transplant operations.

Medicus owner Lutfi Dervishi, his son Arban and the clinic's head anaesthetist, Sokol Hajdini, were initially found guilty of human trafficking and organised crime in April 2013.

“We spent 19 months on that case,” Pineles said, adding that “we had thousands of documents, we had 77 witnesses, medical info and so forth. We found the defendants guilty.”

An appeals court upheld the guilty verdict but then a Supreme Court ruling overturned it on the basis of procedural irregularities and their retrial started in July 2017.

As Pineles recalled, “the defendants were found guilty again”. But the appeals court overturned the verdict again. Now, years after Pineles left Kosovo, the retrial of two of the defendants is still ongoing.

He said that the case highlights issues within the Kosovo justice system that persist to this day

“That does seem to be a pattern of cases going on forever without a resolution,” he said.

“It does seem there is a sort of inertia in the justice system where it is difficult to come to a decision. I don't know why that is, it may be that the appellate courts do not have as much respect for the first instance judges.”

Kosovo courts also continue to have difficulties when defendants and witnesses use a variety of languages, as in the Medicus trial.

As Pineles explains in his book, “there were multiple languages during the trial- Russian, Hebrew, Polish, Turkish, and others – that all had to be translated into English and Albanian”.

Another case that Pineles tried was the war crimes case against KLA members Ejup Kabashi and Haxhi Mazreku in Prizren. The two men were accused of participating in an armed attack on the Serb residents of the village of Opterushe in July 1998.

They were initially found guilty, but then, said Pineles, “the appellate court overturned and retried. The trial court found the accused guilty, the prosecutor appealed and another appellate court agreed with what we had done [in the first trial] and reinstated the verdict.”

This convoluted process highlighted differences between Kosovo's courts and those in his native country, Pineles believes.

“What I determined is that the decision of the Basic Court is not entitled to as much weight as I was used to in the US,” he said, explaining that in the US, a trial court decision is usually upheld by the appeals court.

“Not always, of course, because mistakes are made,” he added. “But the appellate courts, at least in my home state of Vermont, try to find a rationale to support the lower court decision. In Kosovo my feeling oftentimes was that the appellate court looked for ways to overrule the lower court decision.”