PRISTINA (AP) - Kosovo’s ineffective criminal justice system is failing victims in the disputed province, posing a threat to its future stability, Human Rights Watch said in a report yesterday. Authorities have failed to address key problems with legislation, police and the courts in the seven years since the UN took over administering Kosovo, Human Rights Watch said in a 74-page report. “Right now, accountability for past crimes isn’t on the agenda for Kosovo. But resolving Kosovo’s status without fixing the justice system will poison its future,” Holly Carter, the group’s Europe director, said.

SOFIA (Reuters) - Thousands of workers marched through Bulgaria’s capital yesterday as unions demanded better living standards and more action from the government to ensure 2007 EU membership. Protesters blocked traffic and shouted abuse at Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev’s Socialist-led government, saying if it did not convince Brussels that Bulgaria was ready by a new deadline in October, they would expect it to step down.

A Bosnian-Serb court sentenced three former Serb soldiers to a total of 36 years in prison for killing and torturing Muslim civilians during Bosnia’s 1992-95 war, an official said yesterday. The Banja Luka county court found the three former guards at a wartime detention camp guilty of murdering two Muslims detained in the camp, the court official told AFP. The court also concluded that “from June until August 1992, as guards in the detention camp of Manjaca, they tortured and psychologically abused prisoners, mostly non-Serbs,” the official said. (AFP)

Bulgaria defended its standards of higher education yesterday after a Cypriot politician claimed Bulgarian university degrees could be bought with a “few goats and sheep.” The Bulgarian Embassy in Nicosia said many Cypriot graduates had phoned to express “disappointment and dissent” over the remarks, made by opposition right-wing DISY MP Eleni Theocharou. The senior DISY MP told rival communist AKEL MP Nicos Katsourides, an economics graduate from Bulgaria, that a diploma could be obtained by “giving a few goats and sheep to the professor.” (AFP)