Kosovo's request for admission to the Council of Europe is on the agenda of the April 24 extraordinary session

Kosovo's request for admission to the Council of Europe would be on the agenda of the extraordinary session of the Committee of Ministers scheduled for Monday, April 24, Kosovo Online learned from diplomatic sources.

An extraordinary meeting of the Committee at the level of ambassadors was convened today, at the insistence of certain countries of the Quint.

In the draft of the decision that should be presented to the ambassadors in the Committee of Ministers on Monday and for which their support is requested, as we know, it refers to the agreements from Brussels on February 27 and Ohrid, on February 18, which state that Serbia "will not oppose Kosovo's membership in international organizations".

The reason for this haste regarding Kosovo's application for membership is probably "timing", because the session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) begins on April 24, so it is obvious that the intention is to push the whole procedure forward, so that the issue can be brought before MPs, who then decide whether to send the request to the next step - to the Council of Europe Committee of Ministers at the ministerial level, which gathers in Reykjavík on May 16 and 17.

Germany and Italy insisted that the issue of Kosovo's admission to the Council of Europe be "unlocked" already this week, but the ambassador of Iceland, the country presiding over the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, managed to resist those pressures, so Pristina's request was not even at the regular session of Committee of Ministers on Wednesday, and the extraordinary session for today, which was insisted upon by the representatives of Berlin and Rome, has not been scheduled either.

After those pressures did not go away, there were announcements from diplomatic sources that Germany would wait for May 2 and a meeting at a high political level in Brussels between the President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic, and the Prime Minister of Kosovo, Albin Kurti, and to eventually make a move towards the formation of the Community of Serb-majority Municipalities before they raise the subject of Kosovo's admission to the Council of Europe.

However, there has obviously been a change of attitude, primarily in Berlin, which insists on speedily starting the procedure for the admission of Kosovo.