Kosovo Applies for Council of Europe Membership
Last week, on 12 May 2022, Kosovo has formally applied for membership of the Council of Europe. For many years, this did not seem a possibility because not all CoE member states recognised Kosovo as a state, but with the new geopolitical situation following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ousting of Russian Federation from the Council of Europe, the Kosovar government has apparently assessed the time was right to give it a formal try. While this may be an uphill battle (see a reflection here), it will be for sure very noteworthy to follow whether the Council of Europe will again have 47 member states.
The Council of Europe has been working for years with the Kosovar authorities on a wide range of issues (see an overview here) and one could even speak of de facto partial integration into the Council of Europe’s work and normative standards. On addition, the ECHR has been part of parcel of the legal order of Kosovo for a long time too, being applied domestically even if Kosovo so far could not ratify it. This leads to the paradoxical situation that ECHR provisions can be used in Kosovar courts but applications to the European Court of Human Rights are not (yet) possible – one could call this an example of domestication before ratifying. The ECHR is thus not an alien document to the Kosovar legal order.
