Monday, July 20, 2009

Bits and Bites

This is our last week in Kosovo! Yes, time has gone by so fast.

Our report on international presence in Kosovo is nearly wrapped up. The final draft is complete other than that we are waiting to finalize the policy recommendations that are to be included in the research. Oh! This just in! While I was in the midst of writing this blog, my colleague at the office walked in and informed me about some new developments related to our research. First, there is some new info on EULEX. In our report, we found it questionable that EULEX has been fully deployed in Kosovo since December 2008 but had yet to publish any public reports about their progress and activities here. Well, apparently EULEX was ready to finally publish their progress report last week, however, it has been delayed as Kosovo’s deputy Prime Minister boycotted last week’s meeting between EULEX and local government, thereby disabling local authorization of the document. According to my colleague, this reaction is because local government is concerned about the report’s revelations regarding executive involvement in the judiciary. Uh oh. He also just told me that our report probably will not be published and released until September because such matters don’t receive adequate attention from government and civil society during the summer months as so many people are on vacation.

Anyways, in the meantime, we were thinking about writing a new report on legal education reform in Kosovo, however, the plan lost steam as we ran into a few obstacles. First, when we emailed one of our only contacts for an interview, a law professor at one of the universities here, he informed us that his newly established research organization was pursuing the same project with potential funding from USAID and thus meeting with us would probably be a conflict of interest. Then, we soon realized that a comprehensive report on the topic must consider a wide range of issues and we simply did not have enough time left here to gather all the research. For starters, simple statistics about enrolment and graduation rates are not readily available online.

We did, however, finally get our hands on the Legal Education Reform Index (LERI), a report recently published by the American Bar Association (ABA) in Kosovo. Although we won’t be able to produce a report for GAP ourselves, at least we found comprehensive and reliable data for any further projects that the organization might pursue in the future.

One of our colleagues has expressed some particular concerns over the state of legal education in Kosovo, which the LERI has also highlighted as problematic. First, there are far too many law students relative to the number of professors. According to the LERI, there are approximately 5000 students and only 52 academic staff at the University of Pristina Faculty of Law. A second significant concern is that law courses are primarily theoretical with little opportunity for practical training. Some courses on trial advocacy and legal clinics have been introduced, but are only available to a small number of students. And unlike the Canadian system, there is no articling requirement. Other negative factors, according to the LERI, are faculty compensation, access to legal materials and physical and technological infrastructure.

However, the LERI also found several positive aspects of the legal education system here. There has been a strong commitment towards compliance with the Bologna Declaration and its international quality assurance standards for education, despite the fact that Kosovo has not been allowed to participate as a signatory. Kosovo’s legal education system also scored positively in regards to special admissions measures, faculty hiring, promotion and tenure and university and academic freedom. (Of the 22 factors which the LERI evaluated, Kosovo’s legal education system scored positively on 4 factors, received a neutral correlation on 13 factors and a negative score on 5 factors).

In other exciting Pristina news, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at one of the main government buildings last week. But apparently it’s not a big cause for concern as it didn’t actually explode, or it was successfully put out immediately, without any damages. The explosive was launched by a group of local KLA war veterans that were protesting for higher income and greater government compliance with their rights under the law.

posted by Laura Siperman  # 9:25 AM

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