Albanians “deleted” in southern Serbia addresses Constitutional Court

Safet Demirovic and Teuta Fazliu are two of the many southern Serbia Albanians whose addresses have been addressed where they are registered.

The police, they say, have erased them with the explanation that they do not live there.

No one called me, nor did they inform me [that my address has been disabled]”, Demirovic says of Radio Free Europe.

A similar experience says that Teuta Fazliu has passed. Speaking of the REL Balkan Service, she says similar cases -- when it comes to Albanians -- have been in advance, but that the number has increased significantly in recent years.

I am ready to go to Strasbourg [where the European Court of Human Rights]” is located, she says.

The case of Demirovic and Fazliu has reached Serbia's Constitutional Court. In complaints, they say they are victims of discrimination and that police have illegally eliminated them from their addresses to deny basic rights.

In addition to the rights to documents and health insurance, they have thus been denied the right to vote in the elections.

The same claims were made in a report published recently by the Youth Initiative for Human Rights in Serbia. It says that the percentage of addresses disabled in southern municipalities, where Serbs are majority, is much lower than that, or does not exceed one percent of the total population.

On the other hand, in the case of the Medvedja municipality, where a mixed Serb-Albanian population lives, this percentage is much higher than 21.2 percent in 2015-2019.

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Four years ago, Safet Demirovic from Sijarina Banja in the municipality of Medvedja, south of Serbia, has learned by chance that he has been erased from his address. He has houses and companies registered there.

Speaking of Radio Free Europe, he says that in 2019 he went to the local police station “to register the car in his name”.

But the police have been waiting for him to report that his address has been disabled and that he cannot obtain the documents.

Demirovic says he works temporarily in Austria, but that he regularly goes to Serbia. He says he hasn't received any notification of the deactivation of his address.

I have a house and cameras around the object... We'd see if the police had been”, he says.

Demirovic claims that, after that, in an informal private conversation with police, he has been told that he can no longer register at the address in Ciarina Bay, for political reasons, due to “vots in the election”, respectively.

This, because my name is Safet, not Goran, for example”, he says.

Serbia's Ministry of Internal Affairs did not answer Radio Free Europe questions about the problem of deactivating addresses.

Demirovic says that, in the end, he has been forced to register at an address in Belgrade to have residence in Serbia

I feel bad about not being registered in my hearth. Grandpa and great grandfather lived there. We're local. I grew up there. I spent my childhood there”, Demirovic says, adding that this is also why he decided to address the courts in Serbia.

He says he is not the only one who has experienced such a thing in the area where he lives and believes that members of the Albanian national minority are thus targets.

My Serb national friends are working abroad, but their addresses have not been disabled. Our civil rights are denied”, Demirovic says.

Disabled addresses in Serbia take place in line with the settlement Law.

Police, at the request of the court, the state administration or any other body that has justified legal interest, check whether the citizen lives at the registered address.

“Political decision”
Teuta Fazliu says she received a call from police in Bujanoc, southern Serbia, in 2020 to announce her address.

The phone came in the afternoon and I had to call at 10 in the morning. This is where the law was violated. You can't call somebody that day and that day you'll get the answer to”, she says.

Fazliu adds that after a week he received the announcement that his address was disabled, since he allegedly does not live in Bujanoc.

I was on March 11, 2020, because of my pandemic. I've been working from home, I've been pregnant and I've been at home the whole time, says Fazliu, adding that the police didn't keep checking him if he was at the address, as they claim.

She believes her address has been disabled because she is employed in Kosovo and married to a Kosovo citizen. This is the “political decision”, according to it.

“I have planned to go to the end because Serbia, due to the political situation, cannot receive the Albanians' address and identity”, Fazliu says.

She adds that with the address disabled, citizens lose the right to vote in elections, property sales and health care exploitation.

According to the latest census, in 2022, the majority of the population in Bujanoc is of Albanian nationalism.

Procedures Before Courts in Serbia
Demirovich and Fazliu's lawyer, Aleksandar Olenik, tells Radio Free Europe that following the police decision to disable their addresses, he has filed complaints with the Administrative Court on both occasions.

It [the court] has repeated what the police have said without any process to verify”, Olenik says.

He says the next insistence is the Constitutional Court. In his complaint, Demirovic and Fazliu are victims of discrimination.

“in Vojvodina and in central Serbia, police, simply, do not. For example, you have students who have lived unregistered in university centers for years, not living where they are registered. We do not have those cases [of deactivating addresses] even when it comes to other national minorities [in Serbia]”, Olenik says.

Asked by Radio Free Europe how many complaints the Constitutional Court has so far accepted for discriminating the citizens of the Albanian national minority through the instrument of deactivation of addresses, this institution has said that such data is not available.

If the Constitutional Court rejects the complaint, Demirovic and Fazliu could complain at the European Court for Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Disable “addresses suspiciously implemented”
Disactivating the addresses of Albanians in southern Serbia has also been the subject of a Youth Initiative for Human Rights report published in October, which mentions the case of Demirovic and Fazliu.

From July to September this year, researchers from this organisation have investigated about the deactivation of the addresses of citizens of Serbia of Albanian nationalism in the municipalities of Bujanoc, Presevo and Medvedja, known as the Presevo Valley.

According to their data, by 2012, the addresses of more than 2,900 citizens have been disabled in the Presevo Valley.

The report claims that deactivation, in general, is not carried out in accordance with the law.

One of the findings is that 72 percent of respondents with whom we have been able to talk have not made a decision to disable addresses. But citizens face it only when they have to issue any necessary” documents, Free Europe Marko Milosavlevic, one of the authors of the report, says Radio Free Europe.

He believes that, in this way, citizens get into a “kafkian bureaucratic procedure” because they have no documents to complain about.

According to Milosavlevki, some have been forced to stay at home all the time so that police can find at their address and thus prove that they live there.

“This way limits freedom of movement”, Milosavlevic says, adding that citizens with disabled addresses are denied a number of rights, because if personal documents are exhausted, they cannot apply for new ones.

He says that citizens of Albanian nationalism in Medvedja are mostly affected by deactivation of addresses, “questionedly implemented”.

“Based on data from one of the sources, which remains anonymous for security reasons, about 4,000 citizens have been erased from the voters' list in 2015-2019, and most of these people are in the majority Albanian areas of that municipality”, says Milosavljevic.

In the REL question about the problem, the Medvedja municipality said it is not in its jurisdiction.

According to the 2022 census, 6,360 people live in the municipality of Medvedja, while the number of citizens of Albanian nationalism is 905. Serbs make up the majority population of 4,927.

Contradictative Preferences
Political representatives of Albanians for years have warned of discrimination through deactivation of addresses which representatives of the Government of Serbia have denied.

Shaip Kamberi, representative of the Albanian national minority in Serbia's Parliament, in a letter to US Special Envoy for the Western Balkans Gabriel Escobar, in January, has written that Serbian authorities are doing so-called deactivation of addresses in Albanian settlements, aimed at reducing their number in the Presevo Valley.

He, too, has stressed that Albanians in Serbia are victims of tensions between Kosovo and Serbia.

Serbia does not recognise Kosovo's independence, which was declared in 2008.

Under the European Union's mediation, the two countries are in negotiations on normalising relations since 2011.

In September, Minister of State Administration and Local Self-government in Serbia Aleksandar Martinovic has dismissed the claims of former Presevo Mayor Ardita Sinani, that against Albanians in three municipalities in southern Serbia is being carried out “ethnic administrative cleansing”, the ministry's announcement said.

The famous deactivation of the settlements of Albanian nationals in southern Serbia has not been carried out and, in this respect, citizens of Serbia of Albanian nationality have the right to vote at full capacity, like all other citizens of Serbia”, Martinovic said.

The Ministry of State Administration and Local Self-government and the Human Rights, Minorities and Social Dialogue did not answer REL questions about the problem of deactivating addresses.

Warnings by the European Commission and the State Department
The problem of deactivating addresses has been mentioned in the European Commission's report to Serbia in 2022, in the part that concerns respecting minority rights.

Members of the Albanian national minority have reportedly expressed concern about how they are controlled in their settlements.

“Autorities should best explain to the public how those checks are conducted”, the report says.

The US State Department report from 2022 is also considered a controversial practice of deactivating addresses in Serbia.

The police, in a routine, make this decision by making spontaneous home visits. Even though such visits are often made during working hours, as long as the person is not present once to ascertain his failure to keep up with”, the report says.

The U.S. State Department report also says that many people whose addresses have been disabled have not been informed of this and that they only understood when they submitted requests for issuing personal documents.