Ndihmë Juridike Falas
Përshëndetje!
We celebrated my supervisor Anton's birthday this week! In Kosovo, it is customary for the person whose birthday it is to pay for their friends--the inverse of the tradition in the United States--so Anton took us to his favorite café downtown for a coffee. This café, located just off the city center, is a very popular place for businesspeople, government officials, socialites, brunchers, and coffee fans alike, and between the good coffee and great atmosphere, it is not hard to see why. As we sipped our espresso we saw several of Anton's friends and colleagues, including one of CLARD's former interns who is now a lawyer and one of CLARD's partners who is a high-ranking official in the civil society. I enjoyed seeing what a tight-knit community and genuine camaraderie they have; Kosovo is a small country of big hearts.
During the drive to the café, my colleagues pointed out many of the historic and cultural landmarks around the city, ranging from an unfinished pre-war Serbian Orthodox church to the waving statue of US President Bill Clinton. We also visited Pristina's bazaar, a bustling open-air market tucked in the winding alleyways of the older part of the city. The Old Bazaar, dating back to the 15th century, played a large role in the economic, cultural, and physical development of Pristina and once occupied what is now the modern city center. However, much of it was destroyed during a push for modernization in the 1950s, so only a couple of the historic buildings remain and the liveliest parts of the bazaar have localized north of the city center. Today, colorful stands of fresh produce, artisan keepsakes, cigarettes, traditional knickknacks, kitchen utensils, car parts, and much more line the narrow thoroughfares crowded by pedestrians and cars trying to drive in both directions down what feel like one-ways.
This week at CLARD, I have been researching Kosovo's post-war period and transition to an independent nation. While I will devote future blog posts to explanations of the process, institutions, and other particulars of the transition, here I would like to highlight a few of the internal and external barriers I have discovered standing in Kosovo's post-conflict world. Although Kosovo's transition has been widely successful in the twenty years since the war, there are still many issues to resolve. The transitional phase is far from over: institutions were built and independence declared, but now Kosovo is working to meet the standards and directives of European countries and international conventions. In short, Kosovo has entered a period of working to establish robust democratic values and vigorous rule of law.
One external barrier in this endeavor is the issue of recognition. Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, but there are many countries--including five EU countries--that still do not recognize Kosovo as a sovereign nation. This non-recognition complicates Kosovo's international standing and frustrates many of its political, legal, economic, and social projects. For example, one ramification is a lack of extradition from countries that do not consider Kosovo's justice system a legitimate authority, which prevents Kosovo from exacting justice for the acts of known criminals.
There are also barriers manifesting within Kosovo's maturing system itself. This week I got to accompany Edona to a multistakeholder conference on the status of the LGBTQ+ community's access to justice in the Balkans. People in the LGBTQ+ community are marginalized in Balkan society by discrimination and systematic denial of their rights. As is common in Kosovo, there is good legislation in place to address such issues, but the complete and consistent implementation of those laws is significantly lacking. Poor implementation is a product of the insufficient resources, lack of knowledge, deficient budgets, and vulnerability to corruption that contribute to the fragility of Kosovo's young rule of law institutions. Implementation and institutional capacity are certainly progressing, but slowly, giving way to a myriad of problems. For instance, there are severe time delays in court proceedings, so one case may take years to be resolved. Problems like this are especially burdensome to Kosovo's poorer communities, where people have the fewest expendable resources, and marginalized communities, where people have the highest risk of being revictimized either by the system or the perpetrators. People should be able to depend on their justice system, regardless of their societal or socioeconomic status.
The banner outside CLARD's office reads "NDIHMË JURIDIKE FALAS" in big blue letters, and I think it one of CLARD's greatest initiatives, its greatest messages: FREE LEGAL AID. Free legal services are essential to the efficacy of a justice system based in the rule of law because they chip away at some of the most basic barriers to fair administration of justice for all. After the conference my colleague solemnly said that if you have something, you should use it; if you have a constitution that establishes your rights and a judiciary that claims to protect them, you should be able to use that legal framework to access justice no matter who you are. Free legal aid is just the start.
That is all for now, friends, and if you made it this far in the post then thanks for sticking with it. I will be back next week with a prefatory look at some of the issues facing Kosovo's judicial system.
Tung tung!