Mona Bahar, a former judge at the European Court of Human Rights, is now the chairwoman of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, where, as the court’s former senior counsel, she will be responsible for bringing cases.

Although there is widespread scepticism among human rights groups, a handful of human rights lawyers and judges now have a strong argument that, once again, the European court of human rights has not been clear and rigorous enough in its ruling on Kosovo. Most important, they note, Kosovo is itself a member of an independent entity, which has a right under European law to establish justice. They assert that that entity is not a democracy or a federal state like the state of Israel. If the Kosovo court were to be granted jurisdiction over the proceedings, they continue, it could go against all the other international treaty bodies that have jurisdiction over human rights violations in the former Yugoslavia.

“The judges of the European court have declared that Kosovo is a foreign state and therefore has no right … to set up justice and not to get involved in a civilised human rights system,” says the former judge Bahar, who, like Naimi, was a judge at the European court. “I don’t believe that they haven’t made their judgment very clear about the state of Kosovo.”

Kosovo’s claim to independence is a long-standing one. The constitution drawn up by its leader, Hashim Thaci, explicitly states that the sovereignty of Kosovo lies “among other things in the Union of Serbia, of all its citizens, with an equal right to decide their political status”; its capital, Pristina, is located at the mouth of the Danube river. Thaci became president under a 1992 UN resolution, and claims the independence he gained in 1999.

In the words of a senior Kosovar official, Hashim Thaci declared: “The territory of Kosovo is part of Serbia and the territory of Serbia is part of Kosovo.” In a speech to the UN General Assembly in 2006, Thaci said: “We have said repeatedly and at length that we reject all forms of interference, even the most insignificant, in the internal affairs of Serbia. As long as we are in Kosovo we believe that the rights guaranteed by this resolution to all the people in the country … will apply.”

In 2006, two months after the UN declared Kosovo a state, Thaci issued his first decree, extending his sovereignty over the province