Trific: Constitutional Court decision “laughable, to say the least,” raises doubts about its intentions

Director of the Institute for Public Research in Gracanica Vladan Trific said that the Constitutional Court’s decision on the appeals filed by the Democratic Party of Kosovo, if the full decision is indeed as presented in the published summary, was “laughable, to say the least” and raised doubts even among laypeople about the Court’s intentions. He pointed out that if the deadline for electing the President of Kosovo is October 6, while Albulena Haxhiu’s term as Acting President expires two days earlier, a legal vacuum would arise between October 4 and 6.

“The Constitutional Court stated in its decision that the deadline for electing the President began to run on August 6 and that the 60-day period expires on October 6. However, there is another article of the Constitution which states that an Acting President may perform that function for six months, and that period expires on October 4. This brings us to a legal vacuum from October 4 to 6, so perhaps we are expected to see someone—let us call him Albin Kurti—proclaim himself emperor, king of Kosovo... whatever, because there will be no constitutional mechanism or constitutional safeguard to prevent something like that,” Trific told Kosovo Online.

However, given that the Court’s full decision has not yet been published, Trific allowed for the possibility of an error—that the text had been poorly translated or that certain sentences had been selectively and tendentiously extracted from the complete decision. He noted, however, that if the decision was indeed as reported, it was something that would raise serious doubts about the Court’s intentions even among laypeople.

“The first issue on which the Constitutional Court ruled was whether the Assembly had been lawfully constituted. And they concluded that it had not been lawfully constituted because all the deadlines had expired. But then they reached the following decision—that the Government was elected in accordance with the Constitution. In other words, an Assembly that was not constituted in accordance with the Constitution elected a Government that was constituted in accordance with the Constitution,” Trific pointed out.

He noted that, at the same time, the Constitutional Court had concluded that the Assembly was constituted even though a Deputy Speaker from the PDK had not been elected.

“And we all remember the Constitutional Court’s previous decision, when the Assembly was declared not to have been constituted because a Deputy Speaker from the Serbian List had not been elected. What was published today is, to put it mildly, laughable,” Trific said.

The Kosovo Constitutional Court ruled that the constitution of the Kosovo Assembly and the formation of the new Government were not contrary to the Constitution, and that a new President must be elected no later than October 6.