Serbian Prime Minister Alexandar Vučić convened an emergency cabinet meeting due to France’s refusal to extradite the former prime minister of the unrecognized Kosovo, Ramush Haradinaj to Serbia. This was reported by the Serbian national television RTS.
Earlier, the Court of Appeal of the French city of Colmar rejected the request of Serbia to extradite Haradinaj. On January 4, the French police arrested him at the request of Serbia in connection with accusations of war crimes during the conflict in Kosovo and Metohija in 1998-1999.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) suspected the former prime minister and one of the former commanders of the Kosovo Liberation Army of torture and ill-treatment, violation of the laws and customs of war, and demanded that he be sentenced to 20 years in prison. However, Haradinaj was twice acquitted. As the judges noted, the processes “took place in an atmosphere of intimidation of witnesses”.
Ramush Haradinaj served as the premier of the self-proclaimed republic of Kosovo from December 2004 to March 2005. Earlier, the former Kosovo Prime Minister had already been detained in Ljubljana in 2015, but a few days later he was released.