Kosovo’s Supreme Court has annulled in its entirety an administrative instruction governing the promotion of Kosovo Police officers, ruling that the regulation exceeded the legal authority of the Police Director General and unlawfully altered the existing promotion system.
The ruling, issued on July 28, 2026, approved a lawsuit filed by V.Z. against the Kosovo Police, while also considering the claims of interested party V.S. The court declared Administrative Instruction No. 01/2026 on the Procedure for the Promotion of Police Officers unlawful and repealed it in full.
The case challenged provisions of the instruction adopted on May 26, 2026, particularly rules allowing police officers with at least 10 years of active service to apply for two ranks at once without meeting the minimum time requirement in the preceding rank.
Under the disputed rules, officers who had not previously served as sergeants could, in certain circumstances, compete directly for the rank of lieutenant alongside officers who had completed the regular promotion process and already held supervisory responsibilities.
The Supreme Court found that the changes went beyond regulating the procedure for promotions and instead introduced substantive changes to the police ranking system.
According to the ruling, the Police Director General had the legal authority to issue regulations concerning promotion procedures, but did not have the authority to fundamentally alter the statutory ranking structure or create a new mechanism allowing officers to bypass ranks.
The court also found that the new instruction was inconsistent with the Administrative Instruction No. 03/2013 on Standards for Drafting Normative Acts. It concluded that there had been no sufficiently identified problem or justified need for replacing the existing 2019 regulation with an entirely new instruction, rather than amending it if necessary.
The Supreme Court further identified problems involving the clarity and coherence of the provisions, their justification, accessibility, and the failure to provide interested parties with an adequate opportunity to express their views during the drafting process.
One of the court’s key concerns was the impact of the new promotion system on merit-based advancement. The ruling noted that performance evaluation had been given a reduced weight under the new instruction, falling from 10 percent under the 2019 rules to 5 percent.
The court also identified inconsistencies between the required period in a rank and the performance evaluation period. It found that requiring two years in a rank while assessing performance over the previous three years was insufficiently clear and did not demonstrate a coherent regulatory objective.
According to the ruling, the new promotion mechanism also undermined the principles of meritocracy and equality by creating unequal treatment between officers who had advanced through the regular promotion system and those who had remained without promotion for a decade.
The Supreme Court concluded that organizational needs could not be used as an unlimited basis for creating new substantive rights or changing the statutory promotion structure.
Among the grounds cited for annulling the administrative instruction were:
- lack of legal authorization for the Police Director General to make substantive changes to promotion requirements;
- unlawful alteration of the established rank-by-rank promotion system;
- violation of the hierarchy of legal acts, as a bylaw cannot amend or expand provisions established by law;
- unequal treatment of different categories of police officers;
- lack of proportionality between the stated objective and the measures adopted;
- exceeding the limits of administrative discretion;
- lack of a sufficiently justified need for adopting the new regulation;
- failure to comply with procedures for drafting subordinate legislation;
- failure to provide interested parties with an opportunity to submit their views; and
- lack of clarity, coherence and consistency within the administrative instruction.
The ruling effectively restores the legal status quo concerning the promotion framework, while emphasizing that any substantive changes to the police ranking system must be addressed through appropriate legislative amendments rather than through an administrative instruction exceeding the authority granted by law.
