"Friedrich Ebert": We wrote the CSM Statute on our own initiative; we will present it in two weeks

The draft of the Community of Serb-majority Municipalities (CSM) Statute, which had been prepared by the German "Friedrich Ebert" Foundation, would be available to the public in about two weeks, the Foundation's office in Pristina confirmed for Kosovo Online.

As they say from "Friedrich Ebert", they "on their own initiative" started the drafting project of the Statute "in order to help solve the issue of CSM".

"In the first part of the drafting project, students and doctoral students of constitutional law from Kosovo participated, and later they were joined by experts. The foundation has been working on this since 2015, and the new document will be a refined version," one of the coordinators in the Pristina office of the Foundation said.

According to the Foundation, "experts from Belgrade and numerous international experts" had worked on the document.

The representative of the "Friedrich Ebert" Foundation in Pristina, Rene Schlee, stated two days ago that the drafting of the Community of Serb-majority Municipalities Statute had been completed.

To remind you, in April 2018, the European Union gave a mandate to the Management Team for the formation of the CSM to start the work on the drafting of the Statute and to finish the work within four months, which was done within the stipulated period and in August of that year the Management Team officially informed about it E U. However, Brussels did not announce anything after that; neither did they call a meeting where that document would be presented.

The Brussels agreement, in which the largest part is dedicated to the Community of Serb-majority Municipalities, was signed in April 2013 and has been waiting for implementation ever since. The current Prime Minister of Kosovo, Albin Kurti, persistently rejects any possibility of implementing the CSM, and in the past months, this issue has been brought up in attempts to continue the dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina. The authorities in Pristina, despite the signed agreement from Brussels, do not want the CSM to have any executive powers, and they resent the "mono-ethnic" character of the Community.

For all the reasons mentioned above, it will be interesting to see how the Draft of the CSM Statute was compiled by the "Friedrich Ebert" Foundation.