As readers of this website know only too well, the Kosovo case is fascinating and stunningly difficult on multiple levels simultaneously. Political, moral, precedental, timescale, ethnic, existential.

The territory of Kosovo itself is smallish by international standards, ranking at 168th out of 249 countries listed in the CIA World Factbook – a bit bigger than Cyprus (and some way bigger than eg North Yorkshire), but some way smaller than Montenegro.

The issues swirling around its status have swirled away for hundreds of years, with successive colonisations and invasions and rounds of expulsions and ethnic cleansings and wars and sustained sulks down the ages.

I joined the Embassy in Belgrade as a squeaky clean innocent young dip back in early 1981, just after ‘disturbances’ in Kosovo sent a ripple of anxiety through the communist world and beyond – was Titoist Yugoslavia collapsing only a few months after Tito’s death?

And I have followed the question closely ever since, although I was far away at Harvard on a sabbatical when NATO forces bombed Kosovo/Serbia in 1999 and so missed being in any way part of that grim episode’s policy chain.

Since then the USA, UK and Germany supported with varying degrees of enthusiasm by other Western states and beyond have helped bring Kosovo to its current situation, a new state recognised by over 60 countries: not bad, but far from a majority, and not recognised by many of the world’s largest including Russia and China, two UN Security Council members, or India or Brazil.

Thus the question of Kosovo and its status has finally made its way to the International Court of Justice. An earlier posting on this here. And lots more on Kosovo if you run this site’s Search function.

Different readers have given their views, many spared from knowing anything much about either the facts or the international law issues at stake, but by no means thereby constrained from opining on them all with vim and vigour.

So, for now, let’s step back and leave it to the experts, the world’s top international lawyers addressing the ICJ and trying to establish which of the mass of legal and factual arguments sloshing around the subject are the most pertinent and cogent.

The ICJ website helpfully makes available quickly very readable transcripts of the oral arguments.

Try for starters the first day’s arguments by Serbia, then the response on behalf of Kosovo (including former FCO Legal Adviser Michael Wood). 

Each side has a team of lawyers who tackle different parts of the argument. The more brilliant the lawyer (and they are all heavy-hitters) the simpler they make it sound. Of course.

Other transcripts are being posted as those countries which want to make specific representations do so, but with not very long to speak. China coming up. 

Maybe it all boils down to a couple of blunt questions:

  • at what point if any does a state’s unhappy internal plight allow the international community to accept as a fact that it has failed within its existing borders, with a new configuration emerging and deserving  recognition?
  • how to balance the rival territorial and political claims of Serbs and Albanians/Kosovars against the wider (negative?) precedents which this case arguably sets for international order as a whole?

The Kosovo case is mainly about the first, Serbia’s case mainly about the second.

And both have implications for that one eternal question at the heart of international law:

Peace?

Or Justice?