The announcement by the Kosovo Special Chambers’ Office of the Special Prosecutor that it is seeking a 45-year sentence for Hashim Thaçi is not simply a procedural development. It is a significant moment for international criminal justice: one that forces us to ask what the sentence is intended to do, to represent the law or to demonstrate power?
Written by: Dr. Nevenka Tromp
Punishment in international criminal law is not symbolic. It is comparative, cumulative, and based on decades of jurisprudence developed by tribunals such as the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
A request for 45 years immediately places a case at the top of the punitive spectrum, alongside the most serious crimes and broadest forms of liability ever tried.
For this very reason, such a request requires careful consideration. Excessive prosecution occurs when the ambition of the prosecution exceeds the discipline of the evidence—when the charges, modes of liability, and demands for punishment extend beyond what can be supported by the proven facts. It is not an aberration, but a recurring temptation in international justice systems, where prosecutors enjoy structural advantages over the defense and where expressive punishment is often confused with legal force.
ICTY jurisprudence provides a cautionary example in the case of Tihomir Blaškić.
Blaškić was charged with crimes committed in 1993–1994 throughout Central Bosnia, held a clear de jure command position within the HVO, and was initially presented as one of the main architects of the criminal violence. The Trial Chamber imposed a sentence of 45 years. However, on appeal, much of the prosecution’s theory collapsed. The Appeals Chamber rejected the broad interpretation of command responsibility, overturned the main findings, and reduced the sentence to nine years.
At that time, Blaškić had already served almost his entire sentence and was released shortly afterwards.
The reduction from 45 to nine years was not a marginal correction. It was a rejection of excessive prosecution.
This story matters because punishment in international criminal law is fundamentally relational. It must be assessed in relation to the scale of the crimes, the temporal and territorial scope, the number and profile of the victims, and, most importantly, the mode of responsibility of the defendant. These criteria explain why life sentences were handed down to figures like Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadžić, both convicted of genocide, committed over years, over vast territories, with thousands of victims.
In this context, the SPO's stance on sentencing in the Thaçi case appears legally inconsistent. The charges relate to a much shorter time frame, a narrower territorial scope, and a limited number of victims, most of whom are Kosovo Albanians.
Unlike Blaškić, Thaçi did not hold a clear de jure command position. The prosecution relies largely on theories of de facto authority within the KLA, where formal command structures were fragmented and notoriously difficult to prove. To seek a sentence comparable to those imposed in genocide cases, or to those later overturned on appeal, raises serious questions about sustainability.
Age further complicates the issue. Thaçi is in his sixties. Such a long sentence, if passed, would be tantamount in practice to life imprisonment. Sentencing law has long recognized that punishment should be assessed not only in abstract years, but also in real human terms. A de facto sentence of life imprisonment in a non-genocide case of limited scope conflicts with the maximum sentence limit established by international jurisprudence.
None of this is an argument against accountability. It is an argument against punishment as spectacle. Excessive demands for punishment often function not as legal conclusions but as power moves—a means of portraying the accused as morally irredeemable and of shifting the burden of moderating excesses to judges. History shows that such strategies may succeed temporarily, but they weaken decisions and invite their reversal on appeal.
The lesson from the Blaškić case is not that international courts err in correcting excesses of jurisdiction. It is that international justice is undermined when prosecutorial ambition supersedes evidence. If the legitimacy of international criminal law is to be preserved, sentencing must remain anchored in proportionality, consistency, and evidence, not in symbolic escalation.
Dr. Nevenka Tromp is a professor at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. She was an investigator in the Slobodan Milosevic case.
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