Five organizations called unequal treatment. The law provides a simpler test: identify the rule, identify the decision, and let the facts decide who is wrong.
Kosovo Dispatch Legal Desk | 24 August 2026
On Saturday afternoon the terrace of the Liqeni i Dukagjinit hotel above Radoniq (Radonjić) Lake was nearly empty. The manager, Festim Xharavina, put out a statement: "we have not received any documentation, nor any decision," so work continues, and he believed the whole thing was a misunderstanding between the ministry and the water company he calls his contractor. He was right about one thing. Until an enforceable decision reaches him, the law lets him keep serving lunch. The decision was scheduled to issue Monday. His business sits in Zone II of the lake's sanitary protection belt under Government Decision 09/127, on the water company's own land, under the water company's own contract, and the acting environment minister gave him ten days to clear his equipment out. No court was involved. None is required.
Two days before that statement, on 19 August, Srpska Lista MP Jovana Radosavljević published her reading of the week: "For Albanians, courts, procedures, and protection of rights. For Serbs, demolitions, police armed with assault rifles, excavators, and fists in their own homes." She called it an ethnically motivated pattern of discrimination and institutionalized hatred, and in the same statement found room for the Ibër (Ibar) bridge and the Visoki Dečani monastery. The same day, five NGOs, New Social Initiative, CASA, ACDC, Aktiv and InTER, issued a joint statement finding different treatment: at Radoniq the institutions respected judicial procedure, while at Ujman (Gazivode) the owners received fifteen days to vacate without a prior judicial decision. The MP alleges hatred. The NGOs allege selective law. Both readings rest on the same chronology, so let us read it. But first, read what both of them left out.
Radoniq is the reservoir from which KRU Gjakova draws the drinking water of around 214,000 people in Gjakova, Rahovec and the surrounding villages; it is the sole source of the regional supply system. Ujman (Gazivode) is the country's largest reservoir, strategic infrastructure feeding the Ibër-Lepenc canal that carries drinking water toward several cities, cooling water for power generation, and irrigation for the fields along its route. The buildings in this story stand on the shores of the two lakes Kosovo's population drinks from, and Kosovo's Water Law treats such shores as a category apart. Article 7 places water resources outside private ownership altogether, whatever the legal status of the land they touch. Article 48 prohibits construction within thirty meters of an accumulation's high water line. Article 66 establishes sanitary protection zones around drinking water sources, and Government Decision 09/127 draws those zones at Radoniq, where the Liqeni i Dukagjinit hotel sits inside Zone II. Read together, these provisions mean the courtroom history everyone is arguing about answers a different question than the one that matters. Litigation over title tells you whose loss a demolition is and who might claim compensation. It cannot make lawful a structure the statute prohibits, because ownership was never the structure's problem. The buildings at both lakes were unlawful from the day they were built, under an article, not an ethnicity. What the law requires before any wall comes down is something else, an enforceable administrative decision naming that wall, and that requirement, as we will see, is exactly where the real question at Ujman (Gazivode) lives. A final judgment on ownership, for any owner at either lake, would have decided whose loss it was. It would not have moved the building an inch back from the water.
Now the chronology, which is theirs. By the NGOs' own account, KRU Gjakova initiated proceedings over the Radoniq structures in 2019. The proceedings ran roughly a year. The owners appealed, then went to the Supreme Court, and by November 2021 they had lost at every instance. That month the ministry received the request to remove the buildings. The NGOs' own statement, in the course of accusing the institutions, describes these owners as owners of illegal facilities. On that much, everyone agrees.
The ministry acted on 18 August 2026.
So the seven years Radosavljević offers as proof of Albanian judicial privilege break down as follows: two years of litigation the Albanian owners lost, followed by four years and nine months of a ministry ignoring a final judgment against them. The courts did not protect these owners. The courts ruled against them, conclusively, and then nothing happened until the same month the excavators reached both lakes. A privilege that consists of losing in every instance and then waiting five years for the consequence is a privilege the Serb owners at Ujman (Gazivode) also enjoyed, since the land under their villas was registered to Ibër-Lepenc in 2018 and the company did nothing about it for eight years. On the record before us, the first thing Kosovo's institutions did with both files was identical. They sat on them.
Then came the week in question. Five structures demolished at Radoniq on 19 August, structures the institutions state were built illegally on the waterworks' land. A hotel ordered closed on 21 August by administrative decision, with contract termination and a ten day deadline, at a business the NGOs' own comparison presupposes is not Serb-owned. The ministry has additionally asked investigators to examine its own former officials for enabling the Zone II contract. Radosavljević's sentence about courts for Albanians was published two days before an Albanian operator learned from an inspection record, not a courtroom, that his business closes.
The NGOs' phrase deserves the most careful answer, because it is dressed as law. Without a prior judicial decision assumes Kosovo law requires a court to authorize administrative enforcement in advance. Kosovo law requires no such thing. The Law on General Administrative Procedure requires an enforceable administrative decision before enforcement touches anyone's rights, article 143. It makes an appeal against that decision suspensive by operation of law, article 130.1. It requires a formally notified execution order, article 149. Those are the protections the legislature wrote, and every one of them is a stronger safeguard than the phantom rule in the joint statement, because every one of them can actually be invoked by an owner holding a paper with a date on it. A prior judicial decision requirement for administrative enforcement appears in neither the Law on General Administrative Procedure nor the Water Law. We invite the five organizations to identify the provision on which their standard rests. Last week we watched international missions recite a version of the same phantom, which raises the uncomfortable possibility that the missions' legal standard and their implementing partners' legal standard are the same document, and that nobody has read the actual one.
Why, then, did Radoniq get years of courtroom process and Ujman (Gazivode) none? Because judicial process arrives when someone files, and because what gets filed is never the question of whether the building may stay. At Radoniq, KRU Gjakova sued to establish its property right and the owners defended through three instances; the courts settled ownership. At Ujman (Gazivode), the occupants' claim rests on ninety nine year leases issued by Srbijašume, a Serbian state forestry company, on land carried in Kosovo's cadastre under Ibër-Lepenc since 2018; whether those leases can stand against that registration is a question now before Kosovo's courts, with the machines already at the shore. Courts adjudicate what is put before them, and even a perfect victory in either courtroom would have left its winner owning a building the Water Law forbids on that shore. The litigation at Radoniq measures nothing about the buildings. The litigation at Ujman (Gazivode) is measured by what it asks: possession and title, never the shore.
Then the joint statement stops describing and starts theorizing. The ministry's negligence at Radoniq, the organizations write, set against its urgency at Ujman (Gazivode), raises the suspicion that "the only reason" the minister ordered the Radoniq demolition "is an attempt to simulate the legal process and equal rights for everyone." Read that sentence at walking speed. It proposes that Kosovo's Environment Ministry demolished five Albanian-owned buildings, closed a functioning Albanian-run hotel, ordered a public company to break its own contract, and referred its own former officials for criminal investigation, as set dressing. The hedge is the mechanism: a suspicion is a thing no evidence can be brought against, because its authors never asserted a fact. And notice what the theory does to the ministry's five years of inaction on the November 2021 removal request. Under the joint statement's logic, not enforcing a final judgment was ethnic privilege, and enforcing it is ethnic cover-up. Every possible act of the institution confirms the theory. A theory that every fact confirms is not analysis, whatever letterhead it arrives on. In ordinary language it has a shorter name, and organizations that would correctly refuse to publish the suspicion that the Ujman (Gazivode) demolitions were staged to distract from ministry corruption should explain why identical reasoning becomes respectable when pointed the other way.
One question at Ujman (Gazivode) is real, and we have already said so in print. Whether an enforceable administrative decision stood behind the Jezero demolition is before the Mitrovica court, which has demanded to know who acted on what instrument. If no such decision existed, article 143 was violated, and this desk is on record pledging to publish that finding when it comes. That remains the difference between our position and the joint statement. Ours can lose.
Which leaves the question we would put to the embassies and missions that cite these five organizations as monitoring partners and fund their reports, whose findings then travel onward into reporting chains. One detail belongs in that file, and it comes from KoSSev, not from us: the Srpska Lista MP whose statement shares the joint statement's central thesis is the former executive director of the New Social Initiative, the first organization on its signature line. Let us be precise about what that overlap establishes, which is not coordination; we have no evidence of any, and we assert none. What it establishes is that the independence expected of civil society analysis has to be demonstrated rather than presumed when a party deputy and a monitoring consortium publish near-identical framings on the same day and the personnel history runs between them. The MP's statement found space for a bridge and a monastery; neither her text nor the organizations', as their own sympathetic outlets carried them, spends a sentence on what fills the two lakes. So the question for the internationals is the same one-question discipline we applied to the missions themselves last week. When a partner publishes a legal standard that exists in no statute and a suspicion that no evidence could dislodge, does that document enter your reporting as civil society analysis? A finding is a claim that survived a test. The Jezero file may yet fail ours: produce no enforceable decision, and article 143 decides the matter against the ministry, and we will print it. The five organizations' theory has no equivalent point of failure. Delay proves discrimination; enforcement proves simulation. A conclusion protected from every possible fact is many things, but a finding is the one thing it can never be.
this editorial is approved for publication by Professor Kadri Kryeziu, chief legal analyst and publisher of the Kosovo Dispatch
