Fourteen years ago, based on a request for an advisory opinion submitted by the UN General Assembly, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) irrevocably sealed the legality of Kosovo’s Declaration of Independence.
In a 54-page decision summarized in 123 paragraphs, the Court extensively justified how the Declaration of Independence of February 17, 2008, did not violate any general or special norms of international law and that Kosovo’s secession from the predecessor state constituted an irrevocable fact.
Prime Minister Albin Kurti expressed regret that this ICJ decision was not used to eliminate Serbia’s strategy of interfering in Kosovo’s internal affairs through the former framework of the Brussels Dialogue.
“The ICJ Advisory Opinion represents a rare instance where the Court unequivocally and with deeply convincing interpretation supports the birth of the right of a people oppressed and colonized for decades by a chauvinistic, criminal, and genocidal power, to exist as an independent and legitimate state under international law,” Kurti wrote on Facebook.
He stated that the impact of the ICJ Advisory Opinion was and continues to be significant.
“It constitutes an uncontested constitutive fact of the argument that the existence and continuity of the state of Kosovo has been and will remain just. Eminent jurists reference it endlessly in modern literature, while law students learn it as one of the most substantive judgments that laid the foundations of norms regulating the birth of a new state in a contemporary post-genocidal and post-colonial context. Serbia’s tendencies to minimize the weight of the ICJ Advisory Opinion, including the non-implementation of the principles of the UN Charter in its relations with Kosovo, which are an essential part of the Basic Agreement, will remain actions of a state that, in bad faith, attempts the failed rehabilitation of itself in the community of civilized nations after committing genocide in the territory of three present-day states and continues to institutionally deny it,” Kurti concluded.
