A Question for Christopher Hill

The organisation Christopher Hill advises has revived the organ-trafficking allegation by explaining its absence from the indictment through concealment. The investigation it invokes said Albania gave it full cooperation. Tirana is entitled to know which record Hill stands behind.

by Ardit Rada (Tirana)

Christopher Hill was the American chargé d’affaires when the United States reopened its embassy in Tirana on 1 October 1991, in room 205 of the Hotel Dajti, with the residence next door in 206. In interviews with Albanian television last winter he said that the Albanians of today are the people he met in 1991. Albania has treated him as a friend since.

He also knows the courtroom this concerns. In November 2025 he testified before the Specialist Chambers as a defence witness and told the judges he did not regard the KLA as a vertically organised structure with a hierarchical organisation. He put what he knew into the evidentiary record. That is the standard, and one passage in a report carrying his name now asks him to apply it to Albania.

Hill is a Senior Advisor to the Pupin Initiative. Its report of 10 September on Kosovo’s Serbs, examined here on Monday, contains a chapter on the Specialist Chambers that leaves Kosovo. The report notes that Dick Marty’s organ-trafficking allegations are absent from the indictment and explains why: what proved decisive was what could be proven, and “the level of concealment was such that, in practice, there were neither witnesses nor cooperating witnesses”. Then it closes its circle: where fear governs, evidence disappears.

The allegation was about Albanian territory. Marty described detention sites in northern Albania, at Kukës, Cahan and Rripë near Burrel, and alleged that a small group of prisoners was taken to the Fushë Krujë area, where they were summarily executed before organs were removed from their bodies. Albania is the geography of the allegation. If it never became a charge because of concealment, that concealment is being invoked to explain an allegation rooted here. The report never names Albania, and never has to.

In September 2011 the European Union created a Special Investigative Task Force under Clint Williamson to investigate Marty’s allegations. On 10 May 2012 the Albanian parliament adopted Law 53/2012, allowing the task force to investigate on Albanian territory and requiring Albanian authorities to provide the cooperation and assistance it requested. Williamson called the vote a strong statement of Albania’s commitment to accountability and the rule of law. On 29 July 2014 he reported. On organs, the evidence needed for a charge “we have not yet secured”; there were “compelling indications” involving what he called a “handful” of cases, “meant literally”. He named the obstacle: a climate of intimidation around investigations of the former KLA, in Kosovo. And he named the states that had helped. The governments of Montenegro and Albania “were extremely helpful and responsive to our requests for full cooperation”.

The indictment came in 2020. It charges murders, persecution and detention in Kosovo and in Albania. It contains no organ count. Two successor prosecutors, the powers of the 2012 law, six years, and no charge. Williamson’s belief never became one.

Even that belief does not do the work Pupin asks of it. He put the intimidation in Kosovo and the cooperation in Tirana. Pupin keeps the intimidation, drops the location, and lets it settle over Albanian ground.

Either there is evidence that prisoners were killed in Albania for their organs, or there is not. Albania opened its territory by statute to the investigation and was thanked for its cooperation. Twelve years later, no organ-trafficking charge exists. Pupin cannot turn the absence of evidence into evidence that the evidence was successfully concealed. Facts do not acquire an intermediate state because a think tank needs an analogy.

Hill is free to advise Pupin, and his name is one reason Washington will read it. Tirana is therefore entitled to ask what his name is lending weight to. The man who reopened America’s embassy in Albania has attached his standing to a document telling Washington that an allegation rooted in Albanian territory died, as the report puts it, of concealment.

Does he stand behind that?

If he does, Albania should hear the evidence. If he does not, Pupin should hear it from him.