THE HAGUE, Netherlands – The European Union-backed Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague has sentenced former President of Kosovo Hashim Thaçi to 25 years in prison after finding him guilty of war crimes committed during the violent independence war against Serbia in the late 1990s, international judicial authorities announced on Wednesday, September 16, 2026.
The 58-year-old former statesman, who co-founded and directed political and operational campaigns for the guerrilla Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), was convicted alongside senior wartime associates at the conclusion of a three-year international trial that examined atrocities committed between 1998 and 1999.
Okay News reports that the trial panel found Thaçi criminally culpable on multiple counts, including murder, arbitrary detention, torture, and cruel treatment of perceived political dissidents, traitors, and ethnic Serbs, while dismissing several secondary charges as unproven.
Prosecutors had sought a maximum 45-year custodial term for Thaçi and his three co-defendants—former parliamentary speakers Jakup Krasniqi and Kadri Veseli, and former lawmaker Rexhep Selimi—alleging that the KLA command structure orchestrated systematic enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings that claimed nearly 100 lives during the conflict.
The three-judge panel handed down a 25-year prison sentence to both Thaçi and Krasniqi, while Veseli and Selimi received sentences of 18 and 13 years respectively, holding the former insurgent leaders legally accountable for command failures and direct involvement in wartime detentions.
Throughout the extensive proceedings, Thaçi maintained his innocence, testifying that his actions were directed solely toward defending the freedom, dignity, and survival of the ethnic Albanian population against Serbian forces, in a conflict that claimed more than 10,000 lives before a 78-day North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) air intervention halted hostilities.
Thaçi rose from a guerrilla figurehead known as “the Snake” to become Kosovo’s first prime minister upon its historic unilateral declaration of independence in 2008, before being elected president in 2016, an office he resigned from in November 2020 to surrender voluntarily to the international court in The Hague.
The landmark ruling provoked emotional scenes across Kosovo, where Thaçi remains widely venerated as an architect of national sovereignty, with thousands of citizens carrying national and Albanian flags gathering in central squares across Pristina to watch the judgment delivered on giant outdoor broadcast screens.
Public gatherings across the capital turned sombre as the sentence was read, with citizens weeping openly in disbelief while civic leaders and veterans’ organizations criticized the tribunal as an attempt to equate the legitimate resistance of the KLA with the state-sponsored repression executed by the regime of Slobodan Milošević.
International legal and human rights observers observed that while the judgment reinforces the legal precedent that former heads of state are not immune from international accountability, the verdict is expected to heighten political friction between Pristina and Belgrade as negotiations over diplomatic normalization remain deadlocked.
