The draft constitution was signed by Kosovo leaders on Monday (7 April) and will enter into force on 15 June.
Drafting had begun early last year based on principles derived from the UN-sponsored Ahtisaari plan for supervised independence, which includes detailed mechanisms for the protection of Kosovo's minority communities. The document has acquired new significance since Kosovo declared independence on 17 February, although the country is still administered by Unmik, the UN mission, under an Unmik-drafted constitutional framework dating from 2001.
The constitution defines Kosovo as a country of all its citizens and contains extensive protections for minority communities, particularly Serbs, who make up less than one-tenth of the country's population. Many provisions, including reserved seats for minority representatives in the assembly, are taken from the current constitutional framework. Laws which touch on the vital interests of minority groups can pass only if they meet the double majority mechanism used in neighbouring Macedonia, under which majorities both of deputies representing the majority community and those representing minority communities are needed.
Open questions
Florian Bieber, a Balkan expert at the University of Kent, describes the constitution as pragmatically leaving open key questions of political organisation. It does not, for example, prescribe the degree of devolution to Kosovo's 35 municipalities, a question that will come to the fore once the Serbs, which now largely boycott the work of Kosovo's institutions, return to the political process.
Article 1 declares that Kosovo “shall not seek nor accept union with any state or part of any state,” a provision designed to dispel fears from Macedonia that its own ethnic-Albanian region, abutting Kosovo, might break loose. Serbia harbours similar worries about three majority-Albanian municipalities in the Preševo valley, which were detached from Kosovo and annexed to Serbia in 1945 because of their strategic location on the Belgrade-Thessaloniki axis.
Bieber believes that the constitution does not preclude a possible consensual swap of territory between Serbia and Kosovo at some point in the future. Schemes are widely discussed – and rejected – for exchanges, including particularly the majority-Serb northern tip of Kosovo for the Preševo valley. These debates are likely to intensify as Kosovo consolidates its statehood.
