THE HAGUE (AP) – The UN war crimes court will make a ruling on Thursday in the war crimes trial of former Kosovo Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj and two others charged with murdering, raping and torturing Serbs. The prosecution accuses the three former senior figures in the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army of pursuing an “ethnic cleansing” policy in 1988 to evict Serbs and political rivals from territories they controlled. The verdict is now due on April 3, the court said.

SOFIA (Reuters) – European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso urged Bulgaria yesterday to step up the fight against rampant graft and put corrupt high-level officials and criminals behind bars. Bulgaria and its bigger Balkan neighbor Romania joined the EU at the start of 2007, and were put under monitoring largely due to concerns they have not reformed their sluggish and graft-prone judiciary systems. “We expect more concrete results in terms of the fight against organized crime and corruption... We cannot repeat all the time that more needs to be done,” Barroso told reporters.

Turkey is restoring access to YouTube after the video-sharing website removed the videos that prompted officials to block access in the first place. The video file-sharing website said Thursday that it had removed the videos a prosecutor deemed insulting to Turkey’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who established the country after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. (AP)

A human rights group criticized Kosovo’s justice system yesterday, saying its failure to fairly and adequately prosecute criminals is to blame for its ongoing ethnic and political violence. New York-based Human Rights Watch urged Kosovo’s government and European overseers to improve Kosovo’s “extremely weak” justice system. “Kosovo’s criminal justice system is broken,” Holly Cartner, Human Rights Watch’s director for Europe and Central Asia, said in a statement. “It’s in urgent need of fixing and that will take a real commitment by the government and the EU.” The 34-page report criticized the system’s insufficient police support for prosecutors and deep divisions between national and UN-appointed judges and prosecutors. It said prosecutors were suspicious of national officials’ ability to conduct fair investigations and deliver unbiased verdicts in sensitive cases, such as ethnic crimes, political violence and corruption. (AP)

Croatian police said yesterday they were trying to track down a fugitive former army general who is a suspect in a series of murders carried out earlier this week. “Among the people we are searching for is Ivan Korade,” a police spokesman told journalists. “We believe he has information which could help police in clarifying these murders,” he added. More than 300 police officers, including special units, had been deployed in northern Croatia since the murders were committed. (AFP)