Emmerson: The prosecution is non-professional. I don't know who the witnesses are gonna invite.

Discussing the conduct of investigations, at the conference on the performance of the issue against Thaci and others, lawyers have stressed the problem of numerous material editing.

The defence of former President Hashim Thaci, Gregory Kehoe, has said that in the documents they possess are edited, the names of people, countries and other elements, which, according to him, made the defence investigation difficult.

 “In the many editings which are present, there are editings that interfere with us in an extraordinary way, for example, we talk about paragraph 141 of the new unread complaint in 1998 and then editing again, that means within two lines there are editing, editing the country, editing people, editing operational elements as well. I'm sure you've seen the witness document and you see, I believe you've seen with your own eyes that the entire pages of witness statements are all empty because they're out of discussion, do you mind our investigation, without question? This is about the delayed extraction of documents which are part of the material's scope according to rule 102%3) and also the document expected by O The SB and the United Nations, and these are institutions that have told us that they want to look at their archives for these documents, this is a procedure that the SPS didn't do, but that we've done in”, Kehoe said.

He said that out of 326 witnesses, 91 of them are anonymous.

 “We have 91 anonymous witnesses from 326 witnesses completely, some of them will give evidence, but from the total number of 326 witnesses 91 are witnesses who haven't been released and we are 68 days before trial, this is an extraordinary enterprise, venture that we are carrying out despite the extraordinary restrictions that we have before” he said.

Lawyer Kehoe said there were planned interviews but after the judge's decision he had to cancel them.

Here he mentioned diplomats in the United States.

 No one has told us as protection that any witnesses were afraid or did not want to speak to the defense, no other court, nor The Hague Tribunal nor the other tribulals have had such procedures, nor the editorials in those courts have been so, we have been cuffed in our dealings with witnesses. The prosecution has the right to speak to these people, it has the right to discuss with these people, but the question is how to deal with a witness who is on the prosecution list and who will be a witness of protection and the prosecution has no intention of calling them at all, there are diplomats in the United States who did not enter this category, even in those cases we should meet the terms of this protocol and invite them and invite the prosecution into our discussions with that witness. In addition to the time factor, all these other people will come to our discussions with these witnesses, from the administrative office, from the prosecution, this will not help much and hinder our” process, he said.

After this part of the session has been edited.

And Kadri Wessel's lawyer, Ben Emmerson, has criticised the prosecution for failing to efficiency.

 A prosecutor who, two years later, is unable to present a real list of witnesses aimed at calling because I don't know which witnesses he'll call and they can't tell us at the time, because they don't know who they are. And now in terms of the process, the preparation of this court broadcast case, what the prosecution tells us is that we don't want to be disciplined, we're going to be brought before the court with the number of witnesses we have because no one on the other side of the court is exercising a disciplined approach to the evidence presentation, even after two years with four accused who are held in custody by a prosecutor who doesn't have a plan for a trial is a shock notion<1>, Emmerson said.

He has asked the judge of the preliminary procedure not to grant him freedom away from the prosecution.

 So we invite you to stop giving this prosecutor a freedom, but force him to reach some decision or make important decisions during this summer instead of going on summer vacation, the prosecutor's staff should stop giving off their vacation and work, formulate their case, show which witnesses I'm going to call in the first three months of judgment, who are the first 107 witnesses, and who are the exact ones, so they have to be disciplined professionally, because if you don't do that, you'll have an unprecious prosecution, and we know that all such witnesses can hold on until at least seven years of trial. It's your honored court decision that when the last point is reached, but we suggest you don't leave this decision for September”, he said.

The lawyer Roberts, who defends Rexhep Selimi, has also spoken of numerous editings.

 The sooner the SPS decides and communicates about the status of witnesses and what position they have in the judicial process I think will serve the court in general. As for the editorials in the indictment, in the preliminary file, I believe you've seen it in our statements when we gave a specific case with a claim when the information is all edited, it's about a specific claim of my client, I can't discuss this claim because I have no idea on which basis such a claim was made. This is just one such example, the result is that I can't investigate, my team can't do any kind of investigation regarding this claim and I don't know when this editorial will be removed”, he said.

The conference on the performance of the issue towards Hashim Thaci, Jakup Krasniqi, Kadri Veselini and Rexhep Selimi is continuing with discussions between the parties. While the accused are participating in the video connection.

The act towards Thaci and others regarding war crimes claims has been confirmed on October 26, 2020, while in their first presentations at Specialised Chambers in The Hague they have been declared innocent.

They are staying in custody at The Hague since November 2020.

On April 29th, the Specialised Prosecutor's Office has handed over a amended indictment against Hashim Thaci, Kadri Veselin, Rexhepi and Jakup Krasniqi, where it claims the accused committed war crimes in Gjilan, Budakov and Semetish.