Kosovo Courts Too Lenient in Femicide Sentences, NGO Warns

A Kosovo women's rights NGO has said that judicial institutions are not treating femicide with due seriousness but are instead often reducing jail sentences from life imprisonment to tens of years.

The latest case concerning the NGO happened on Thursday, when the Court of Appeals reduced a 2021 verdict convicting Bajram Velija to life for murdering his wife to 25 years, citing mitigating factors.

"The reduction of these penalties is ridiculous and our institutions are only showing how they do not treat violence and murder of women seriously," Besarta Breznica, from Kosovo Women Network, KWN, the largest women's rights NGO in Kosovo, told BIRN.

"These punishments only encourage violators to commit such crimes and discourage domestic violence victims from reporting violence to the relevant institutions," she said.

The Court of Appeals defended its decision, saying life imprisonment had been too harsh and did not take account of mitigating circumstances.

According to the indictment, Velija's wife died on the spot when, after a quarrel, he shot at her 15 times on August 6, 2019, only meters from their house in Prizren.

He then waited for the police and informed his family members, as well as hers, which the Appeals Court considered mitigating circumstances.

The Court also considered as mitigating circumstances the fact that he was "a father of three children, of relatively old age, that he regretted it, sought an apology from the deceased's daughters and simultaneously sought a public apology in court … and has not been previously convicted of a criminal offence".

Aggravated murder in Kosovo is punishable by a minimun of 10 years and a maximum of life imprisonment.

Velija's case is not the first where a...