Pensioners sue Government, Finance Ministry for Rights In violation

The Kosovo Institute for Justice (IKD) and the League of Municipal Organisations of Pensioners and Labour Invalids have accused the Kosovo government of violating the law and rights of hundreds of thousands of pensioners, not increasing pensions on the basis of calculating their cost of living and adapting to inflation.

In addition to eight thousand individual indictments that pensioners have filed against the state as a cause of this issue, the IKD has warned it will take legal steps to sue the Ministry of Finance and the government at the Constitutional Court in Pristina for failing to implement and act on the law.

IKD senior researcher Naim Jakaj has said that just like past governments, neither the current government has observed the two laws regulating the pension issue. He has said that the state with law failure is violating the rights of over 149,000 pensioners who receive basic age pension as well as the rights of 49 thousand other pensioners who receive the contributing pension.

There are two laws in Kosovo that regulate the pension issue: the law on pension schemes and the law on assigning methodology to assess basic retirement. Two laws with certain articles regulate the issue of how pensions should be raised or what they should be like so that retirees can spend the month well. As Kosovo's Justice Institute, I have found that past governments, but even this current one, do not respect these two laws according to specifications or according to the requirements they have in the provisions of these two laws. Under the law on the appointment of pension height methodology, the government, the Ministry of Finance, in this case, are entitled to assign the next year's calendar fund to the next pension, the next amount, in terms of inflation, in terms of living costs, food baskets, and inflation. Such a government, the state, is failing to do so, resulting in the violation of the rights of over 149,000 pensioners who receive the basic age pension that is already 100 euros;”.

The rights of approximately 49 thousand other pensioners who receive the contributing pension” are being violated on the other side, he has said of Economists.

Jakaj has said that as the Institute has asked the government and the Ministry of Finance to implement the law in relation to the pensioners' demands, adding that, in the opposite case, if no steps are taken in the month's term, they will file charges at the Constitutional Court of Government and the Ministry of Finance.

The chairman of the League of Municipal Organisations of Pensioners and Labour Invalids, Nijazi Gashi, has said the current law does not meet the conditions, is bad law and is contrary to many other laws operating in Kosovo.

For that, he has said he has demanded that a new law on pension schemes be made. Gashi has added that their demands have been encountered in deaf ears and that the government has not responded in any case to those requests.

He has said pensioners had signed a contract with three lawyers who would prepare the pensioners' indictments for no cost at all, but, according to him, there has been reactions from the government, which he says has prompted them to break up this contract. Gashi said that by this move the government has made flagrant direct interventions into the basic rights of pensioners.

We've had the headship meeting a month ago and we've made the decision to bring this phenomenon under control by seeing that those who've filed individual indictments, every lawsuit has cost them between 50 and 150 euros to do so. After the meeting, three lawyers have come, offering us free service without money, without even a expense, and it has seemed more acceptable to us than to go individually and pay up to 150 euros. We have a contract with them, but at the same time the government has come up with two statements that this is fraud, that's misuse. And we got a request two weeks ago from lawyers to interrupt that procedure, normally that we interrupted, this is a flagrant and direct intervention of government into the basic rights of pensioners”.

“On one side didn't raise pensions, on the other hand you get the right to complain, and where to hang these poor people's hopes, I call them because a man who depends on 100 euros a month for me is miserable. Until we received email from senior lawyers, the number was about eight thousand lawsuits”, said the Chairman of the League of Communist Organisations of Pensioners and Labour Invalids, Nijazi Gashi.