The Swiss and the Serbs

One of the curious aspects of the Serbian delegation to the ongoing talks over the future of Kosovo is the presence of Thomas Fleiner, a Swiss law professor. So why is a Swiss working with the Serbs? Like Vojislav Koštunica, Serbia's prime minister, Fleiner specialises in constitutional law. He is head of the Institute of Federalism at Switzerland's Fribourg University, so he is supposed to know about all the various arrangements that states conjure up in order to balance demands from ethnic groups or regions.
Fleiner's wife, who is also a legal scholar, happened to work with Koštunica's wife in the 1970s at Belgrade's Institute for Comparative Law. And Fleiner knows the region too. He became an honorary citizen of Serbia and Montenegro, although that particular construct, dreamed up in Brussels, fell apart last year as soon as the Montenegrins were given a chance to vote on it.
Beyond his technical expertise on federalism, Fleiner's specific usefulness to the Serbs is probably that they would like to keep the question of Kosovo's status in the realm of academic law, rather than admit that it might have something to do with politics.