Kosovo's law on Special Protective Zones gives the Serbian Orthodox Church a voice, a list, and a forum. This week the Eparchy of Raška-Prizren claimed a veto, and the European Union, reading the statute correctly, declined to invent one.
Kosovo Dispatch Legal Desk | 31 July 2026
Two kilometers west of Visoki Dečani Monastery, on a road that already exists, machines are at work on a surface that residents drive every day. That is the entire physical event. The paper event is larger. On 29 July the Eparchy of Raška-Prizren announced that works had resumed inside the monastery's Special Protective Zone without prior notice to the Church and without its consent, which the Eparchy asserts the law requires. Within a day, Serbia's Ministry of Culture was demanding an urgent reaction from UNESCO and Belgrade's office for Kosovo was calling on international representatives to respond. Kosovo's Deputy Ombudsperson, Srđan Sentić, opened an investigation on his own initiative. The mayor of Deçan, Bashkim Ramosaj, said the works were road maintenance. And on 31 July the EU Office in Prishtina, invited to join the alarm, answered with a statement that deserves closer reading than its diplomatic upholstery invites. The Office said it had been informed, had coordinated with the other international organizations active on Special Protective Zones, and was encouraged to note an official exchange of views between the monastery and the municipality in which, as the Office put it, it was clarified that the current works fall within routine road maintenance.
We want to be precise about what happened in that answer, because both sides of this dispute will be tempted to misfile it. The EU did not authorize the works. It verified them. A clarification is a finding of fact, not a grant of permission, and only one of the two is provided for anywhere in the law that governs the zone.
That law is worth quoting rather than characterizing, since the Eparchy's claim rests on a characterization. Law No. 03/L-039 on Special Protective Zones, adopted in 2008 as part of the Ahtisaari package and published in the Official Gazette that June, regulates activity inside the zones through two operative articles, and both are governed by the same word. Article 5 prohibits "any new activities" in listed categories, among them "transit roads in rural areas." This is the provision that made the transit road from Deçan to Plav unlawful as a category, and it is absolute. No consent from any party could authorize such a road through the zone, which also means the prohibition is not the Church's to enforce or to waive. It belongs to the law. Article 6 then restricts a second list, and its opening words are "any new activity." The list includes road and street construction, alongside commercial development, structures taller than the monument, public gatherings, and the urbanization of agricultural land. For these, the statute prescribes a procedure: the municipality concerned "shall seek the agreement of the Serbian Orthodox Church. If no agreement is reached, the parties shall refer the matter to the IMC for review."
Read those two sentences again, because the entire dispute lives inside their grammar. The municipality must seek agreement. It is not required to obtain it. When agreement is not reached, the activity does not die; the file moves to the Implementation and Monitoring Council, where the Bishop of Raška-Prizren sits with the EU Office, the OSCE Mission, and the Republic's ministers responsible for spatial planning and culture. The drafters of this law, who were not careless people, built a consultation that terminates in a forum. They did not build a consent gate. A consent gate makes the Church a permitting authority inside the perimeter; a consultation with arbitration makes the Church a party with a guaranteed voice and a guaranteed hearing. The Eparchy's communique, as relayed by media in Belgrade, performs two conversions on this text in a single claim. It converts "any new activity" into any works at all, and it converts "seek the agreement, then refer to the Council" into consent required. The statute it cites is the statute that refutes it.
And the maintenance of an existing road does not reach even the first conversion, because it is not a new activity in any language the law speaks. Article 5 regulates what may never be added to the zone. Article 6 regulates what may be added only after consultation. Neither article regulates the continuation of what is already there. A road that residents of Deçan have used for years is part of the zone's existing life, and its upkeep is neither prohibited nor restricted; it is simply not the law's subject. The EU's clarification this week landed exactly on that line, which is why we call its reading correct rather than merely convenient. For the same reason, we welcome the Deputy Ombudsperson's investigation without anxiety. The statute will say to him what it says to any reader who begins at Article 5, and a finding to that effect from an institution of the Republic will carry more weight than the same finding from us.
If the point needed a witness, the Church supplied one five years ago. Between 2018 and 2020, construction of the transit route was attempted inside the zone repeatedly, despite the bypass agreed in 2014; a section was even opened in June 2020, until the prime minister suspended the works that August and the Council settled the matter in November. On 9 November 2020 the Implementation and Monitoring Council endorsed an arrangement for the roads of Deçan municipality under this same law: an international bypass to be developed outside the zone's boundaries, and the local road inside the zone to be rehabilitated, the two synchronized. The abbot of Visoki Dečani welcomed the arrangement publicly as a deal that would be internationally monitored and that, in his words at the time, ensured respect for the law the Church had insisted on from the start, with the local road's rehabilitation named as part of it. The Eparchy's own announcement this week places the works on the existing trace of the Deçan to Plav corridor, and the local road on that corridor inside the zone is the road whose rehabilitation the Church accepted in 2020, at the table, through the forum the law provides. What has changed since is not the statute, not the road, and not the works. What has changed is the use to which an alarm can be put.
We should be honest about why the alarm finds hearers. For eight years the road file carried a genuine grievance beside it: the twenty four hectares that Kosovo's Constitutional Court ruled in 2016 belong to the monastery went unregistered while the municipality resisted and successive governments in Prishtina declined to compel it, a delay that was the Republic's discredit for as long as it lasted. It lasted until March 2024, when the government directed the Cadastral Agency to execute the judgment and the land was registered to the monastery. The Diocese confirmed the closure in its own words: the decision executed, the process finally resolved. The remedy ran where the law sends remedies, through the Republic's institutions, and it arrived. Article 11.5 keeps that file separate from this one in any case, providing that nothing in the Special Protective Zones regime prejudices ownership rights within the zones. But the separation now cuts deeper than procedure. The property grievance was real, and it is closed, by the Republic's act and the Church's own confirmation. What remains to braid into this week's alarm is a file the Eparchy itself marked resolved more than two years ago. Reaching for it anyway is not legal argument; it is a filing decision, and the file it serves is not this road's.
There remains the question of communication, since that was the word the EU chose to lead with, and since we agree with it. Communication is the foundation of understanding; the Office is right, and the exchange between monastery and municipality this week is the practice working as it should. But communication keeps that character only for as long as everyone can say what it is not. Consider what this week's record contains, read without the statute beside it: a municipality that came to the monastery, an exchange of views, a clarification, international offices noting the result with approval. Read with the statute, that is courtesy working. Read without it, it is a procedure, and a procedure once described can later be demanded. Nothing in this week's events obliges anyone to read the record the second way. Nothing prevents it either, except stating plainly, while the events are fresh, which reading is true. Deçan informed the monastery because informing is voluntary, neighborly, and free, and it should go on doing so on exactly those terms. The statute has a word for what the municipality owes, and the word appears in Article 6, attached to a list, and this road is not on it.
The law's first articles state what the zones are for: the peaceful existence and functioning of the sites, the preservation of the monastic way of life, and the harmonious and sustainable development of the communities that live around them. Normal life inside the zone is not the hazard the statute guards against. It is one of the things the statute guards. A road maintained is the zone functioning as drafted. A road maintained by permission would be the zone functioning as annexed, and no one at the table in 2008, or in 2020, agreed to that.
