Azem Vllasi was a Chevening Scholarship holder in early 1970s and studied at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

The autonomous province of Kosovo at the time had an equal vote in the federal presidency of Yugoslavia with the Yugoslav republics, and its own executive body, legislature, and judiciary.

In November 1988, Kaqusha Jashari, who had succeeded Vllasi as LKK president in April, and Vlassi himself were toppled in the Anti-bureaucratic revolution because of their unwillingness to accept the constitutional amendments curbing Kosovo's autonomy, and replaced by appointees of Slobodan Milošević, the leader of the League of Communists of Serbia at the time.

On 13 March 2017 Vllasi was wounded by an assassin at the entrance of his office where he worked as a lawyer, who was later arrested together with an accomplice.

[4] The assassin was Murat Jashari, who was sentenced to psychiatric treatment at the Institute of Forensic Psychiatry in Pristina, where he later died of cancer on 3 March 2021.