A Favorable Climate for the Law for lustration

Ismet Salihu, professor of Criminal Law, said Kosovo since the end of the war has had to have that law, but something like that is now impossible.

“It is impossible to become lustration because a legal system, a prosecutor, an effective autonomous professional judiciary and conscience has not been built in our Kosovo yet. So, to get this job done, that's lustration work in this environment what it is now, with this extreme politicisation of all segments, unfortunately even of police and investigative, prosecutor and court, the damage would be far greater than the benefits”, Salihu said.

Professor Salihu also said it would be better to wait a few more years until circumstances arise for such a law.

The situation is not good either. You see the situation between parties, you see the composition of the Parliament and the Government, it's all fragial. If this work is introduced and an illustration law is issued, there would be even greater disorder on the political scene and the entire justice system. So it is better to wait five or ten more years”, Salihu said.

On the other hand, at the Association of former Political Prisoners, they do not know why so far Kosovo does not have such a law.

The chairman of the former Political Prisoners' Association, Hydaje Hyseni, told Radio Free Europe that the lustration issue in Kosovo is delayed. He, even, values Kosovo as a special case on this issue.

According to him, such a law has been required in various forms, with initiatives and proposals, demands and legislative programmes, but nothing concrete has yet happened in terms of drafting and adopting it.

“Although Kosovo has had more reasons than other countries to handle this problem properly, this has not happened. Kosovo has been the country with the highest level of both political depression in continuing, then the consequences of the armed conflict of Kosovo and what has preceded all that has happened”, Hyseni said.

Hyseni said the association requires that this issue should no longer be dragged on.

“This issue is the task of Kosovo institutions, and the Government must take the experiences of other countries, make the proposals of the laws, and enter into this project, and in this process the interested ones, different factors that can help a lot, not in the sense of dramatising tension, but rather of absorption and constructive resolution in the function of the future”, Hyseni said.

Otherwise, the Council of Europe has long approved two resolutions by which it requires that the principles of a legal state, implementation of lustration laws, or relevant administrative measures be respected during drafting the lustration Law.

According to these resolutions, some of these fundamental orientations should be: lustration should be directed against the dangers that can be observed by basic human rights and democratic processes; revenge should be, not the objective of these laws, and their use for political and social purposes should be avoided; lustration should not be aimed at sanctioning the guilty, but at protecting the emerging new democracy.

In Kosovo, lustration is a not-known political term. This notion comes from the Latin word ʹ lustration, lustration, meaning cleansing. In literature, lustration has two meanings - historical and modern.

As a historical term, it is related to the rites of the Romans and the ancient Greeks by cleansing of sins. While, the modern version relates to the temporary restriction of spies and secret police informants in civil service tasks, in the process of decommunising a country. /rel/