Admit Kosovo to the Council of Europe

As a European democracy Kosovo should have a place in the Council of Europe. However, Kosovo’s membership application has met unprecedented opposition, including from major European countries that claim to support Kosovo’s integration into European institutions. With tensions in the Western Balkans higher than in the last two decades, Kosovo’s membership would be an important contribution to stability. 

ESI newsletter: Breaking a deadlock – the genius of Ahtisaari – a peace formula (16 May 2024)

ESI paper: Memo on Decani - The rule of law, an urgent issue and Kosovo in the Council of Europe (4 Mar 2024)

On 12 May 2022, Kosovo applied to join the Council of Europe. It is the only European democracy not yet part of the oldest human rights organisation on the continent.

Previously, leading European politicians, including French President Emmanuel Macron, German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock and German chancellor Olaf Scholz, had all affirmed Kosovo’s belonging to Europe and their support for Kosovo joining European institutions.

At the time, ESI called on Italy, France and Germany, to support the next step, tasking the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) to assesses whether the conditions for Kosovo to join the Council of Europe are met. While this is usually a simple and uncontroversial procedural step, we asked:

“But will it happen? Did countries like Germany and France mean what they said to Kosovo’s leaders in recent months? Or will the double standard, which allowed Russia to be a member despite massive human rights violations, but which blocked Kosovo from applying, continue?”

When the member states’ foreign ministers met in Turin on 20 May 2022, they failed to pass the application to PACE to assess it.

When they finally gave their consent a year later, in April 2023, PACE asked “eminent lawyers” to produce an in-depth report on the candidate. Published in November 2023, the report noted that Kosovo has a “functioning parliamentary system”, its government is “determined to fight corruption” and there are “strong guarantees for independence of the judiciary.” It also stressed that the non-implementation of binding court decisions on a land property dispute involving the Orthodox Decani monastery was an issue of major concern:

“The [Constitutional] Court decided that 24 hectares of disputed land belonged to the Visoki Decani Monastery. This judgment was criticised by politicians and, despite repeated appeals by the International Community, not implemented. This is a clear violation of the rule of law. The Kosovo authorities should implement without further delay the judgment of the Constitutional Court in the Visoki Decani case.”

Similar messages came from the three rapporteurs appointed by PACE, members of parliament from Greece, Sweden and Monaco.

On 4 March 2024 ESI published a memo explaining the issue at stake and a newsletter calling on the Kosovo government to resolve the issue:

“The Supreme Court and the Constitutional Court are Kosovo state institutions. Implementing their judgements is a matter of principle for anyone who respects the Kosovo constitution. This is not a concession or something to bargain over. It should be backed by a broad consensus in Kosovo as it is most of all in the interest of all citizens of Kosovo.”

On 13 March, Kurti announced that the single most important obstacle identified by legal experts advising the Council of Europe on Kosovo’s accession would be overcome immediately: the Decani monastery land issue. The government pressured the Kosovo Cadastral Agency, which had refused to implement both Supreme and Constitutional Court decisions for many years, to do so now without delay. On 20 March, Decani monastery acknowledged that it had received the cadastral records for all its disputed land.

With the last condition met, on 16 April, PACE parliamentarians from 46 European democracies agreed by a huge majority of 131 to 29 votes, based on four detailed reports, that:

“Kosovo’s aspirations to join the Council of Europe should be met with a positive response.”

“Kosovo’s legal framework is broadly in line with Council of Europe standards and that its Constitution is a very progressive instrument.”

They called on the 46 member state governments of the Council of Europe to admit Kosovo at the next meeting of foreign ministers in the middle of May 2024. The responsible rapporteur, former Greek foreign minister Dora Bakoyannis summed up the findings by PACE:

“To reach a positive Opinion, it took 300 days, missions to Pristina, North Mitrovica and Brussels, a team of specialized lawyers, and dozens of meetings with governments, ambassadors, Serbian mayors, representatives of the Serbian Orthodox Church, NGOs, and international organizations.

It also required the authorities in Pristina to restore, after 25 years, the property of the most important Serbian Monastery in the region, to retract a bill for the express expropriation of Serbian properties, and to sign a long list of human rights agreements that, above all, put the Serbian minority under international protection.

No candidate member has ever been asked to undertake so many reforms before even being brought up for discussion on its accession to the Organization. This is probably why 83% of the Assembly voted in favor of the Report

The verdict of PACE could not have been clearer: Kosovo met the conditions to join the organisation. And yet, some argued immediately that Kosovo had still not done enough and that the PACE recommendation should be ignored. Already in March 2024, US envoy Gabriel Escobar had stated that for membership in the Council of Europe, Kosovo must first “establish the Association of municipalities [ASM] with a Serbian majority”, a condition not raised by PACE but mentioned in the so-called Brussels Agreement from 2013. The demand was also raised by the Quint (US, UK, France, Germany and Italy).

On 22 March 2024, in the list of post-accession commitments sent to PACE by Kosovo’s three leaders, these committed themselves to “take substantial and tangible steps with a view to implementing all articles of the Brussels and of the Ohrid Agreements which includes establishing the Association of Serb majority municipalities as soon as possible.” On 15 May 2024, Kosovo’s foreign minister even stated that the Kosovo government “is preparing a draft Statute.”

Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vucic, however, declared the same day:

“This is another trick that Albin Kurti and his helpers, including Gerald Knaus and all their other lobbyists, are carrying out together. They themselves say that they will submit their text by the end of May. And who are you to submit your text? In the Brussels Agreement, it is quite clear that this should be done by the management of Serbia, or if we agree, as we agreed contextually, conceptually and in principle, that it should be the text submitted by the EU – what do they have to do with it and what do they have to deliver anything.”

In other words, according to the Serbian president, Kosovo is not to submit any draft statute of the ASM to its Constitutional Court even if it meets all Council of Europe standards (and all the expectations ever expressed by the international community in respect of it), unless it is agreed with Serbia first. This is a trap: for Kosovo, but also for the international community.

Kosovo must never join the Council of Europe. In May 2024, prime minister Milos Vucevic warned that Serbia will always, under any circumstances, oppose Kosovo joining the Council of Europe:

“The so-called Kosovo is not and will never be a state, and therefore, according to the rules of the Council of Europe, it cannot be admitted to the membership of that organization.”

Threats from Serbia had been intensifying for months. On 14 June 2023, Serbian special police forces abducted three Kosovo border police officers and kept them as prisoners for twelve days. On 23 June, Kosovo police stopped a Serb car moving weapons in the North of Kosovo. On 24 September 2023, heavily armed Serb paramilitaries attacked Kosovo police in the North of Kosovo, killing one. The Serb paramilitaries then barricaded themselves in the Orthodox Banjska Monastery. In the exchange of fire with the Kosovo police, three of the assailants were shot.

The leader of the paramilitary group, Milan Radoicic, who then was deputy leader of the Kosovo Serb political party Serbian List, escaped back to Serbia. UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron told the UK Foreign Affairs Committee:

“We have a very clear picture of what happened that day [on 24 September] … If you look at the amount of weapons that were brought to Kosovo and the number of people, if this group had not been stopped by the operation of the Kosovo Police, there would have been a series of attacks on the stations of the Kosovo Police, there would have been barricades in the streets ... they didn’t just have weapons, they were equipped with very heavy equipment.”

On 3 October 2023, the US State Department noted that there had also been an alarming Serbian military build-up on the Kosovo border: “We’ve been monitoring an unprecedented staging of advanced Serbian artillery, tanks, and mechanized infantry units, along the border with Kosovo. And we’ve called on Serbia to withdraw forces from the border.”

Strikingly, despite the 24 September attack, despite the killed Kosovo police officer, despite the many illegal weapons found, and despite the continuing impunity of Radoicic in Serbia, ignoring an international arrest warrant, it was the relationship between Kosovo and its traditional partners, EU member states and the US, that seemed to reach a low point in early 2024.

In mid-February 2024, senior US officials publicly complained about a “deteriorating relationship” between Kosovo and the United States. Relations with the EU looked equally strained. On 14 June 2023, the day of the kidnapping of the three Kosovo police officers in the North of Kosovo, the European Commission announced so-called “negative measures” (=sanctions) against Kosovo. Since then, the European Commission has not proposed to lift these “negative measures.” It kept them after the attack on 24 September. It also kept them after the European Parliament called for them to be lifted in October 2023.

In a newsletter ahead of the May 2024 Committee of Ministers meeting, we warned that:

“by insisting on conditions that would give Serbia a veto and which are not linked to the Council of Europe, European leaders would … block Kosovo not on merit, but arbitrarily. They would signal to Serbia that things settled in 2008 [through Martti Ahtisaari’s comprehensive proposal for the Kosovo status settlement] are now up for renegotiation. This would be an invitation to more threats, risking more violence as in autumn 2023, and the end of the stability which Ahtisaari brought. The best way to prevent this is to admit Kosovo as 47th member of the Council of Europe as soon as possible.”

The ministers had asked for PACE’s opinion in 2023. They received a clear response. They failed to live up to the very clear recommendation by PACE and did not put it to a vote in May 2024 and again in May 2025. They should do so as soon as possible, at the latest in spring 2026. There is no objective reason to delay this further.