Jeff Havenier: Emergency association, Kosovo has responsibility to establish

I would hesitate to say what Prime Minister Kurti understands or doesn't understand. I can still say only what the United States government said publicly and privately, because there is no difference in our message here. We believe this is a matter of urgency and importance as part of Kosovo in fulfilling obligations under the basic agreement and implementation annexes, and as a result of previous agreements from the dialogue since 2013, Kosovo has the responsibility to establish the Association of the Serb Majority municipalities”, Ambassador Havener in Rtv21 said.

“We tried to move it through the provisions of a draft statute that came from Miroslav Lajcak, who he introduced along with top officials of Germany, France, Italy and the US. I can only repeat what we said about this. We believe that an association of Serb majority municipalities should not have executive power, should be fully in accordance with the current Constitution of Kosovo, it should not be an additional layer of government, but have an important role to respond to the address and advance of the Serb community's interests in Kosovo. I think this last issue underlines, again, how urgent this is because part of this concerns questions related to Serbia's support for the health care system and the education system. And those issues of how to integrate into Kosovo's law and structures, how their operations will be transparent to the Government of Kosovo will be addressed in Association, so it has received even more urgency and my government's request for the Government of Kosovo is to move it forward. We believe that this government must adopt, somehow, draft the statute offered and submit it to the Constitutional Court in a way that the Court agrees to give it jurisdiction, so that the Court can then implement the revision of its constitutionality, which is an important step in this” process, said Havener.

Hovenier has been asked whether Kosovo will face new consequences if the Association Agreement is not implemented

“I can't talk about their calculations, I can only talk about the urgency of this. I think and as the current situation shows, this is quite urgent and we would like to see it move forward. And I don't know if I have anything more to say about the consequences I've said. To the extent that the government is responsible for the things we believe to be important and which we believe advance Kosovo's European and Euro-Atlantic trajectory increases our partnership. To the extent that the government does not respond, this affects the quality of our partnership”, Hovenier said.