On June 4, Group for Legal and Political Studies (GLPS) held a Press Conference on the topic: “Implementing the Rule of Law Principles Based on the Venice Commission Checklist: Results and Challenges in Kosovo”.

During the conference, GLPS published the Second Edition of the assessment report which reveals the results of the monitoring and evaluation on Kosovo’s progress in achieving the implementation of the principles based on the Rule of Law Checklist created by the Commission of Venice to the Council of Europe.

This assessment report covers the six-month period of November 2021-April 2022. The methodology is based on the Checklist and contains the following five elements: 1. Legality; 2. Legal security; 3. Prevention of abuse of power; 4. Equality before the law and non-discrimination, 5. Access to justice. The assessment, based on these elements, was made from the point of view of Kosovo’s constitutional provisions, laws, bylaws and rules of procedure as well as the distinction between written law and its implementation in practice.

The overall average grade of fulfillment of all criteria of the checklist for the period November 2021- April 2022 is 56.05% compared to 55.96% as in the previous assessment for the period (May-October 2021)

From the 5 categories the evaluations for each are as follows: equality before the law is rated with the highest points, with a total of 80% fulfillment. On the other hand, the category Prevention of Abuse (Abuse) of Power continued to have the lowest score with 37.5% of compliance. This low percentage is attributed to the fact that there is no adequate implementation or functioning of mechanisms to prevent, correct and even sanction these abuses of power, although the legislation provides clear provisions. All other categories scored an optimal (average) score of compliance, including Legality with 47.14%, Legal Security with 56, 66%, and Access to Justice with 58.95%.

GLPS stated that though there have been improvements in terms of legal certainty and legality the results confirm that the Rule of Law Sector in Kosovo continues to make a difference between de jure reality and de facto reality. The report results reiterated that as a step to increase citizens’ trust in rule of law institutions, more efforts need to be made to ensure transparency, accountability and impartiality of the justice sector. Moreover, the sector of justice and the institutional level need to be further engaged to embrace standards international as those of the Venice Commission checklist, in order to approximate further with the targeted EU integration process, so that EU standards for governance of the law to be met.

This activity is organized within the framework of the project titled: “BOOSTING EFFICIENCY: Monitoring and assessing the implementation of rule of law principles’ in Kosovo on the basis of the Council of Europe Rule of Law Checklist”, financed by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Kosovo, through MATRA Programme.