My Research Continues
This week was the hottest one yet in Pristina. A heat wave has been working its way through the Balkans, and Kosovo is no exception, with temperatures reaching the mid 90s almost every day this past week. Even evenings have been fairly hot, but that has not stopped crowds from congregating every day in front of the jumbotron currently set up beside the Cathedral of St. Mother Teresa to watch Euro 2024. Aside from the jumbotron, almost every restaurant patio along the boulevard now has a screen set up to show the games. The soccer fans around here are clearly very dedicated.
I'm still wrapping up the last few details of my Istanbul Convention project. Anton has very generously been giving me the space to be as thorough in my research and analysis as possible, which I very much appreciate. Anton also told me that he really wants to see what I personally think about the documents I'm analyzing because he wants to see what my outside perspective is as an American.
I ran into some citation challenges while working on my report because I realized that Kosovo isn't in the Bluebook's foreign jurisdictions table, so I was unsure of how to cite Kosovo's Law No. 08/L-185 on Prevention and Protection from Domestic Violence, Violence Against Women and Gender-based Violence, which is one of the three documents I'm analyzing. I reached out to Devan Orr, and she gave me some great advice on how to figure out the correct format, so now I know what it is and have included the correct citation format for Kosovo laws in my report.
To briefly summarize my report, I've been reading the Istanbul Convention and comparing it to both Law No. 08/L-185 and Kosovo's National Strategy on Protection Against Domestic Violence and Violence Against Women. The law was passed as a result of Kosovo's constitutional amendment to abide by the Istanbul Convention, and the National Strategy is Kosovo's plan for implementing the provisions of the Istanbul Convention and addressing domestic violence, violence against women, and gender-based violence. The National Strategy describes three primary prongs of focus: prevention, protection, and reintegration. I organized my report along these lines, plus an additional section about more general observations that impact all three prongs. After analyzing the three documents, my responsibility is to identify issues in both the language of Law No. 08/L-185's text itself and the implementation efforts described in the National Strategy, and then recommend ways to resolve these issues. I look forward to receiving feedback from Anton, since I'm also curious how his perspective will compare with mine.
Now that I am in the final stages of my Istanbul Convention project, Anton also told me a bit about what to expect for my next project. After my report is finished, I will start researching the topic of extradition. Specifically, I will be looking into extradition agreements between Kosovo and other countries, a topic that I'm sure is both very interesting and very complicated due to the number of countries that do not currently recognize Kosovo. I anticipate being able to write about this more next week once I've started my research. For now, though, I'm staying focused on putting together the final details of my research and analysis of the Istanbul Convention's implementation in Kosovo.