The current chairperson of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, Dominique Hasler, said that this committee is examining how to proceed for Kosovo’s admission to this organization.
Hasler, who is the foreign minister of Liechtenstein, the country that has held the presidency of the Council of Europe, said after the meeting of the Committee of Ministers on May 17 that Kosovo was mentioned in the meeting by the member states.
“The acceptance of Kosovo was mentioned several times today in the framework of the national declarations of the ministers. We have received a letter from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe with the recommendation for the admission of Kosovo and we did everything within our presidency to advance the process, together with the member states. And the Committee of Ministers has already started discussions on the issue and is currently considering how to proceed,” she said.
According to the official website of the Council of Ministers, the agenda for the meeting of the Committee of Ministers did not include the vote for Kosovo’s admission to this human rights organization.
Kosovo has already passed two stages in the process of admission to this organization, and the Committee of Ministers is the one that decides whether a state will be admitted to the Council of Ministers or not.
After the recommendation for Kosovo’s admission to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe was passed, several states made it a condition that Kosovo establish the Association of Municipalities with a Serbian majority if it wants to become a member of the organization based in Strasbourg.
Meanwhile, the prime minister of Lithuania, Ingrida Simonyte, said that when it comes to the admission of Kosovo, the issue is not about whether it should be admitted, but when.
After the meeting of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Diaspora of Kosovo, Donika Gërvalla, said that the state’s membership in this organization cannot be stopped “even if it is delayed due to any opponent of Kosovo or lobbying of Serbia. We are on the right path and we are doing good work”.
“We have left no stone unturned, always within constitutionality and legality, for the interest of Kosovo”, said Gërvalla through a post on Facebook.
On May 16, through a letter sent to the Council of Europe, Kosovo said that it promises to draw up a draft statute for the Association and send it to the Constitutional Court for interpretation by the end of May. With this pledge, Kosovo said it fulfilled the condition set by several members of the Council of Europe and Prishtina asked to become a member of this European organization for human rights.
But Germany, one of the countries that has set the condition for Kosovo in the CoE, said that it considers it a “concrete step” only when Kosovo submits the draft statute for the Association to the Constitutional Court.
So far, several draft statutes for the Association have been presented, including one from the EU in October last year.
But, in the letter sent to the Council of Europe, Kosovo said that it intends to draw up its own draft, being inspired by the draft presented by the German organization Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.
At the end of January 2023, FES published a draft statute for the establishment of the Association in accordance with the Constitution and legal system of Kosovo, as the Government of Prime Minister Albin Kurti insists.
