According to Human Rights Watch, the vast majority of abuses were attributable to the government of Slobodan Milošević, mainly perpetrated by the Serbian police, the Yugoslav army, and Serb paramilitary units.

During the war, regime forces killed between 7,000–9,000 Kosovar Albanians,[1] engaged in countless acts of rape,[2] destroyed entire villages, and displaced nearly one million people.

[11] Serbian military, paramilitary and police forces in Kosovo have committed a wide range of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other violations of international humanitarian and human rights law: forced expulsion of Kosovars from their homes; burning and looting of homes, schools, religious sites and healthcare facilities; detention, particularly of military-age men; summary execution; rape; violations of medical neutrality; and identity cleansing.

[12]During the armed conflict in 1998, the Yugoslav Army and Serbian police used excessive and random force, which resulted in property damage, the displacement of the population and the death of civilians.

[24][25] The Yugoslav Army, Serbian police and Serb paramilitary forces in the spring of 1999, in an organized manner, initiated a broad campaign of violence against Albanian civilians in order to expel them from Kosovo and thus maintain the political control of Belgrade over the province.

[32] Nemanja Stjepanović claimed that within the campaign of violence, Kosovo Albanians were expelled from their homes, murdered, sexually assaulted, and had their religious buildings destroyed.

Presiding Judge Iain Bonomy, who imposed the sentence, said that "deliberate actions of these forces during the campaign provoked the departure of at least 700,000 ethnic Albanians from Kosovo in the short period from late March to early June 1999.

[18][39] Throughout the duration of the war, members of the Yugoslav army, police and paramilitaries would remove girls and women fleeing for safety from refugee columns and rape them, at times more than once and later released them to continue their journey.

[37] Although numbers are difficult to determine, following the conflict, there were cases of women committing suicide, aborting their pregnancies, giving birth to children and later raising them or placing them up for adoption with a few instances of attempted strangulation of their babies.

[40] Postwar, the issue of wartime rape did not receive enough attention in the media and in political discourse within Kosovo and victims were left to deal with their experiences in private.

As by October 2018, 250 women have signed up, despite pushing on behalf of the Kosovan government by giving free specialized healthcare and trauma counseling for wartime rape survivors.

[47] In all, eighteen months of the Yugoslav Serb counterinsurgency campaign between 1998 and 1999 within Kosovo resulted in 225 or a third out of a total of 600 mosques being damaged, vandalised, or destroyed alongside other Islamic architecture during the conflict.

[61] Incomplete list of massacres: Soon after NATO started bombing Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milošević ordered that all bodies in Kosovo that could be of interest to The Hague Tribunal should be removed.

[34] After four months of excavations, Serbian forensic-experts located at least seven mass graves and some 430 bodies (including the corpses of women and children) in Central Serbia.

[89] According to the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade and Kosovo, in the period largely covering NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia (20 March-14 June 1999), Yugoslav forces killed 6,901 Albanian non-combatants.

[98] In August 1998, 22 Serbian civilians were reportedly killed in the village of Kleçkë, where the police claimed to have discovered human remains and a kiln used to cremate the bodies.

[102] Incomplete list of massacres: According to a 2001 report by Human Rights Watch (HRW):[113] The KLA was responsible for serious abuses... including abductions and murders of Serbs and ethnic Albanians considered collaborators with the state.

[126] The allegations were first publicized by then Chief Prosecutor for the ICTY Carla Del Ponte in her book The Hunt: Me and the War Criminals in 2008,[127] causing a large response.

Claims were investigated first by the ICTY who found medical equipment and traces of blood in and around the house in Albania that had allegedly been used as an operating theater to remove the organs.

[129] In 2010, a report by Swiss prosecutor Dick Marty to the Council of Europe (CoE) uncovered "credible, convergent indications"[130] of an illegal trade in human organs going back over a decade,[131] including the deaths of a "handful" of Serb captives killed for this purpose.

Responding to this allegation, the head of the war crimes unit of Eulex (the European Law and Justice Mission in Kosovo), Matti Raatikainen, claimed "The fact is that there is no evidence whatsoever in this case, no bodies.

"[133] He described these allegations as a "distraction" that prevented the war crimes unit from finding the remains of close to 2,000 individuals of Serb, Albanian, and Roma ethnicity still missing in the conflict.

[152][153] Slobodan Milošević, along with Milan Milutinović, Nikola Šainović, Dragoljub Ojdanić and Vlajko Stojiljković were charged by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) with crimes against humanity including murder, forcible population transfer, deportation and "persecution on political, racial or religious grounds".

Further indictments were leveled in October 2003 against former armed forces chief of staff Nebojša Pavković, former army corps commander Vladimir Lazarević, former police official Vlastimir Đorđević and the current head of Serbia's public security, Sreten Lukić.

The Niš Military Court had in late 2000 found guilty for the murder of 2 Albanian civilians on 28 March 1999 in the village of Gornja Sušica near Pristina: Captain Dragiša Petrović and army reservists sergeant Nenad Stamenković and Tomica Jović.

The trial, organized in front of the District Court in Prokuplje, finally ended with a guilty verdict in 2002, Nikolic sentenced to 8 years of prison.

In a new trial, in which according to the new procedure the individuals were indicted for a "war crime", the District Court of Pozarevac sentenced Petkovic to 5 years of prison with obligatory psychiatric assistance, while acquitting Simić of all charges.

[165] According to Human Rights Watch, senior leaders of the KLA accused of killings and body transfers to Albania remain at-large, some in high government posts.

[166] In 2016, a special court was established in the Hague to investigate crimes committed in 1999–2000 by members of the Kosovo Liberation Army against ethnic minorities and political opponents.

[170] The charges against Kosovo's president Hashim Thaçi were not announced, but his alleged involvement in war crimes prevented him from attending the signing ceremony for an agreement on limited steps taken towards economic normalisation with his Serbian counterpart, Aleksandar Vučić.