ИПИ Библиотека

The Independent International Commission on Kosovo (IICK) was a commission established in August 1999, in the aftermath of the Kosovo War, by the government of Sweden on the basis of the initiative of its Prime Minister Göran Persson. The Commission assessed that NATO bombing of Yugoslavia was illegal but justified, in order to prevent further atrocities by Serb forces, which intensified even further during the NATO bombing.

The crisis had been caused by ongoing human-rights violations by Serb forces in Kosovo during the 1990s, although when some Kosovars shifted from unarmed to armed resistance, this exacerbated the Serbian response. Serb oppression included many crimes against humanity.

Seven out of eleven members of the commission were from countries which are members of NATO. Richard Goldstone and Carl Tham were appointed as first co-chairmen and other members were chosen for one-year terms. The first eleven members included Anan Ashrawi, Richard A. Falk, Martha Minow, Mary Kaldor, Michael Ignatieff, Grace d'Almeida, Theo Sommer, Jacques Rupnik, Jan Urban, Akiko Domoto, and Oleg Grinevsky.^[5] One of the members, Richard A. Falk, later coauthored a work on distinction between legality and legitimacy published in 2012.

One of its purposes of the commission was to assess "the adequacy of present norms and institutions in preventing and responding" to ethnic conflict as seen in Kosovo.