Hundreds of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo have been imprisoned on political grounds since the revocation of the region’s autonomy in 1990. Most often these people were accused of threatening the integrity of the state by forming parallel institutions, such as the Albanian Ministry of Defense or a “para-police force.”4 Toward the end of 1996 and throughout 1997, more than one hundred ethnic Albanians were arrested and charged with acts of terrorism in connection with the then-nascent KLA, which had taken credit for a series of attacks on Serbian policemen and Albanian “collaborators.”5

Violations of Serbian, Yugoslav, and international law were the norm in these cases from the moment of arrest. Detainees were regularly not informed of the reasons for their arrest, denied access to a lawyer, and held in detention without a formal arrest order from the investigating judge longer than the three days allowed by law.6 Indisputable evidence pointed to wide-scale abuse and torture committed by the police during the investigation period to extract confessions. Attempts by lawyers to introduce evidence, witnesses, or proof of torture in detention were, with rare exceptions, dismissed out of hand.

Many of these abuses were, and still are, related to the generally weak nature of Serbia’s legal system. Since coming to power, Slobodan Miloševic has undermined the rule of law and breached the separation of powers, making the courts the judicial organs of the ruling Socialist Party. While violations of due process are endemic throughout Yugoslavia, there is no question that the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo are especially prone to abuse.

The number of arrests, and the seriousness of abuse in detention, increased as the KLA gained strength throughout 1998. After armed conflict began in late February, the government used the legal system as a way to strike back, not only at the KLA, but at ethnic Albanians as a group. While many of those under arrest did, without doubt, engage in hostilities against the state, there are also many cases where individuals were arrested simply because they were suspected of sympathizing with the KLA. A number of people were arrested because they were in areas where the KLA happened to be present. As some of the cases in this report document, the prosecutor’s office used an extremely broad interpretation of “terrorism” and “terrorist acts” to encompass individuals who had apparently no connection with the armed Albanian insurgency.