A lawsuit is not an injunction. Kosovo law knows the difference. Its international monitors should too.
Kosovo Dispatch Legal Desk | 24 August 2026
On 20 August the Head of the OSCE Mission in Kosovo, Gerard McGurk, gave Kosovo Online an interview. On the demolitions at Ujman (Gazivode) he announced a rule: "Law-enforcement measures should be implemented only after all legal avenues have been exhausted, not before." The European Union Office had reached the same position a month earlier, expressing regret that demolition proceeded while affected residents "had initiated court proceedings" within the fifteen-day deadline printed on the vacate notices.
Both sentences carry the confidence of law. Neither one states any.
The position of this desk is narrow enough to check, and the statute book cuts finer than either statement. Kosovo's Law on General Administrative Procedure gives a person served with an administrative act a genuinely protective remedy: the administrative appeal, which under Article 130 suspends the act's effects by force of law until the appeal is decided, and the same law forbids any enforcement touching a person's rights without a prior executable act (Article 143), announced through a formal execution order (Article 149). That is the suspensive filing Kosovo law provides, and it is not the one the European Union invoked: the EU statement referred to court proceedings, and the Mitrovica courtroom is now examining the antecedent question of what act was issued and by whom. Once a dispute reaches court, the rule reverses. The claim against an administrative act does not stop its execution; the previous administrative-disputes statute said it in so many words, "the claim does not stop the execution of the administrative act against which it is filed" (Law 03/L-202, Article 22.1), and the 2024 law that replaced it keeps suspension in a court's hands, on request. A civil suit freezes nothing unless a judge grants a security measure under Article 297 of the Law on Contested Procedure, available only where the claimant makes credible both his right and the risk to it. The filings the European Union cited were court filings, the non-suspensive kind. The same rule governs the institutions now reciting a different one. Article 278 of the treaty on which the European Union stands provides that actions before its own Court of Justice shall not have suspensive effect; suspension is something the Court must order. In London a claimant who wants enforcement halted needs an interim injunction and gives a cross-undertaking in damages to obtain it. An owner at Ujman (Gazivode) who reached a courtroom held the remedy every litigant from Mitrovica to Brussels holds.
The rule McGurk announced instead, exhaustion of all legal avenues before enforcement, is not the rule Kosovo's legislature enacted. Under his formulation, the builder of any unlawful structure purchases immunity for the price of a court fee and holds it for as long as appeals can be manufactured. No state administers property that way, including the Union whose own treaty withholds from its own litigants the very norm its Office demanded of Kosovo.
In the case that produced the loudest statements, the record has since spoken. Jezero was a motel and beach bar on the Ujman (Gazivode) shore near Zubin Potok, built and run by the Jakšić family, which says it invested in the property for three decades. It was demolished on the morning of 30 July at the direction of the public water company Ibër-Lepenc, with Kosovo Police assistance, the seventeenth structure removed in the campaign. The family had filed its possessory suit five days earlier, on 25 July, asking the court to bar demolition by temporary measure until the ownership dispute was decided. When the case was heard on 12 August, the family's own counsel told the court that had the measure been adopted the day it was requested, the damage could not have occurred. It had not been adopted. On 30 July no court order stood between the machinery and the building; a request did, undecided, and under every statute quoted above an undecided request bars nothing. The institutions criticizing the demolitions were equipped to know it. The OSCE has monitored Kosovo's courtrooms since it arrived. EULEX exists to monitor the justice system, and McGurk himself confirms it was monitoring this. Neither institution's statements claim a court order was violated, because none was. They wrote "initiated." The word was the concession.
We hold this desk to the standard we are applying, and the commitment is in print, dated. If any court, for any of the seventeen structures, granted a suspension that was then overrun, that record describes a government overriding its own judiciary, and we will pursue it to the end, against our own institutions, with more persistence than any mission statement has managed. Nothing published and nothing said in the Mitrovica courtroom shows such a record. What the courtroom shows is a question worth answering: the company denied to the judge that it demolished anything, and the court is now demanding from the police and the ministry an account of who acted and on what instrument. It visited the ruin with a surveying expert the next day. If the answer is that no executable act existed, Kosovo's own statute condemns the method, Article 143 needs no help from invented norms, and the commitment above covers that finding too. If the claimants prove their case, a number will be attached to the damage.
That is what legal avenues look like while they are being used. We expect no corrections; missions do not issue them. What can be asked of them is discipline about whose vocabulary they carry. "Demolished while court proceedings are ongoing" entered circulation from Belgrade's Kosovo office on the morning Jezero fell, Serbia's foreign minister called the same day on the EU, the OSCE, and KFOR to react, and the formulation has traveled through Srpska Lista statements since. The existence of court proceedings, by itself, establishes no suspension in any of the judicial regimes named above, including the ones these missions answer to. Repeated on mission letterhead, the phrase stops reading as advocacy and starts being cited as a finding, and within the week it returns from Belgrade as international confirmation, which is precisely the journey it has now completed twice. The OSCE spent decades building Kosovo's courts; McGurk said so himself, in the same interview. The professional courtesy owed to that investment is small. Before adopting a complainant's language, check it against the statute, which contains a suspensive appeal at Article 130 and an executability rule at Article 143 that no mission statement has cited once, and before the next statement, put one question to the court registry: was a suspension granted. If the answer is no, the grievance is unsubstantiated, and an official who repeats an unsubstantiated grievance in the language of its author has moved from monitoring the rule of law to staffing a press operation. Everyone in the region can name whose.
this editorial is approved for publication by Professor Kadri Kryeziu, chief legal analyst and publisher of the Kosovo Dispatch
