Co-Perpetration Responsibility in the Kosovo Specialist Chambers: Staying on the Beaten Path?

This article examines the legal framework that the Law on Specialist Chambers (SC) and Specialist Prosecutor’s Office (the Law) establishes for the applicable forms of individual responsibility at the SC in Kosovo. For this purpose, it specifically considers how the concept of co-perpetration is defined under each of the three separate paragraphs of Article 16 of the Law: the provision that lists the modes of liability and regulates their use depending on the category of the crime they are charged with. It will be shown that the merger of customary international law and Kosovo criminal law as the SC’s applicable sources of law, and the complicated set of rules that regulates their use and interaction, raises a number of challenges when defining the legal elements of co-perpetration responsibility. Case law from Kosovo’s domestic courts, as well as other relevant jurisprudence from the former Yugoslavia and the international tribunals, will be reviewed to discuss the construction of this mode of liability - both for international and for domestic crimes - under the Law.