HUMANITARIAN LAW CENTER

New York, 20 October, 1999

NATASA KANDIC AND BAJRAM KELMENDI HONORED 1999 AWARD FOR HUMAN RIGHTS DEFENDERS BY THE LAWYERS COMMITTEE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS

Natasa Kandic, Director of the Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Center received yesterday the 1999 Human Rights Award established by the New-York based international organization Lawyers Committee for Human Rights.

Ms. Kandic received the prize in her and in the name of the late Kosovo Albanian lawyer Bajram Keljmendi, who was together with his two sons killed by Serbian police on March 25, 1999, at the beginning on the NATO intervention in Kosovo.

"I am very much pleased to be here" * said Natasa Kandic in the acceptance speech yesterday evening in New York, in front of some 700 representatives of international human rights organizations and corporate America - "And I am very proud to receive this award in my and in the name of my late colleague and friend Bajram Kelmendi. But I am not pleased by the fact that there are still up to two thousand ethnic Albanian political prisoners in Serbian prisons. And I am not happy that I am the only Serb who feels safe in Kosovo today."

Throughout the war in Kosovo, Ms. Kandic did the seemingly impossible, shuttling back and forth between Belgrade and the shattered province, she provided a lifeline of information to the outside world about the massive violations being committed by police, paramilitary units, and Yugoslav Army troops. The evidence she gathered will be vital to the preparation of indictments by the International Criminal Court for the Former Yugoslavia in the Hague.

At 3:30 a.m. on March 25, the first night of NATO bombing, Ms. Kandic received a phone call from a friend in Kosovo to say that police had broken down the door of the family*s apartment and taken away her husband and two sons at gunpoint. Bajram Kelmandi, 62, was Kosovo*s leading human rights lawyer, an ethnic Albanian who was well-known in Europe for his courageous defense of critics of the Milosevic government and victims of Serbian violence. The bodies of the three men were found the next day, dumped by the roadside just outside Pristina.

Today, Natasa Kandic continues her work in Kosovo. As well as urging her fellow Serbs to acknowledge the thruth about the atrocities that were committed in their name, she is busy documenting and denouncing revenge killings by Albanians, and criticizing the failure of the UN Mission in Kosovo to speed up access to legal representation by detainees * whatever their ethnic origin.

The prestigious Lawyers Committee to Protect Human Rights award is every year given "to human rights defenders who have fought relentlessly to protect the rights of others in the face of great personal risk, and even death". Together with Natasa Kandic and late Bajram Kelmendi, the prize is this year awarded to Pakistani lawyers and women rights defenders Hina Jilani and Asma Jahangir, as well as to Chilean lawyer Jose Zalaquett who fought for protection of political prisoners during the Gen. Augusto Pinoche*s rule.