Ethnic Albanians in Serbia and Kosovo accused Serbia of discrimination after the Constitutional Court dismissed a man’s appeal against the marking of his address as ‘inactive’ in official records, meaning he cannot renew his identity documents.
Xhorxhina Bami, November 21, 2024
Medvedja municipality in southern Serbia. Photo courtesy of Nevzad Lutfiu.
A Serbian Constitutional Court ruling has outraged ethnic Albanians in the country who claim they are being discriminated against over the issue of what’s being called ‘address passivisation’ – the marking of people’s addresses as ‘inactive’ in a police database, meaning they cannot renew identity documents.
The November 14 Constitutional Court ruling dismissed an ethnic Albanian man called Safet Demirovic’s complaint against a lower-instance court verdict confirming the ‘passivisation’ of his address in 2019. Demirovic is from Sijarinska Banja in Medvedja municipality in the south of Serbia, where many of the country’s ethnic Albanians live.
“They treated me like a foreign citizen, like I didn’t have properties there for generations. I’ve even had a business there since 2017 but the Constitutional Court did not mention it,” Demirovic told BIRN by telephone on Thursday.
Thousands of ethnic Albanians from three municipalities in southern Serbia, Medvedja, Bujanovac, and Presevo, have had their addresses marked ‘inactive’ by the Serbian authorities.
This means they cannot renew their Serbian identification documents, or exercise basic human rights that require IDs, such as voting. The issue has sparked a series of street protests in the area.
In July 2021, Demirovic filed his appeal to the Constitutional Court against the initial verdict of the Administrative Court in Nis, claiming it violated Serbia’s obligations under the European Convention of Human Rights to ensure fair legal proceedings and to prohibit discrimination.
The Constitutional Court verdict seen by BIRN determined that the Nis court had correctly followed Serbia’s Law on Residence and Residence of Citizens because the address that Demirovic wanted to register in Sijarinska Banja is not the “the centre of his everyday activities and professional, economic, social and other ties that prove a permanent connection with the place”.
According to the court, Demirovic was not found at the address he had applied to register on August 23, 2019, and “neighbours and parents said he was in Austria, where he is employed, and in Sijarinska Banja [only] during vacations”.
The verdict added that on September 6, 2019, “when he was found at the address”, he had confirmed that he had a job in Austria and that “on October 3, 2019 and October 23, 2019, he was not found at the address again”.
Demirovic insisted that he does not only go to the Sijarinska Banja property for holidays.
He also said that since 2017 he has been the owner of a company that provides internet access to remote villages in the municipality of Medvedja. BIRN was able to independently confirm that Demirovic is the owner and director of the company.
He added that in 2020 he inherited his family home in Sijarinska Banja, and has meanwhile purchased other properties. This was confirmed by cadastre and property certificates seen by BIRN.
Demirovic said he will now send the case to the European Court of Human Rights. “This is discrimination,” he said.
Ana Pisonero, the European Commission’s enlargement spokesperson, spoke about the ‘address passivisation’ issue while addressing media on Thursday.
“We have made clear there is a need for Serbian authorities to better explain to the public how the checks of residence status are being conducted resulting to passivisation and whether south Serbia is being specifically targeted,” Pisonero said.
Serbia is currently in EU accession negotiations, and Pisonero said that the concerns of ethnic Albanians are being “addressed in the enlargement process”.
Kosovo Deputy Prime Minister, Besnik Bislimi, also raised the issue this week. Bislimi wrote on X on Wednesday that the Constitutional Court’s verdict “legitimises the systematic discriminatory practice of address passivation targeting Albanians”.
“It violates fundamental human rights, and proves why Albanians don’t trust the system and are reluctant to start judicial processes. These citations from the Constitutional Court decision are a perfect example of how Albanians’ rights are eroded through unfair and discriminatory interpretation, which prove the lack of democracy, basic human rights and minority rights in Serbia,” Bislimi added.
In December 2020, BIRN had reported the case of another ethnic Albanian, Teuta Fazliu, from Bujanovac, who had taken her case to Serbia’s Administrative Court.
Fazliu told BIRN on Thursday that the Administrative Court ruled against her as well, and last year she sent the case to the Constitutional Court, to determine whether there had been human rights violations. She is awaiting a verdict but after reading about Demirovic’s case, said she is “not hopeful”.
Earlier this month, ethnic Albanians staged a protest in the municipality of Medvedja, the third in recent months, following rallies held in two other municipalities in the majority-Albanian Presevo Valley in the south of Serbia, demanding an end discrimination.
Flora Ferati-Sachsenmaier, a lecturer on Society, Politics and Culture at the University of Gottingen, has calculated that between 2012 and 2019, the number of registered voters in Medvedja fell from 10,102 to 6,602. She believes ‘address passivisation’ is a key factor in this.
Ferati-Sachsenmaier said pressure from the international community was needed to obtain “symmetry in ethnic minority rights in the Western Balkans”.
Serbia’s Ministry of Human and Minority Rights and Social Dialogue told BIRN that the 2011 law on residence is applied equally to all citizens, whatever their ethnic background. It denied any discriminatory targeting of ethnic Albanians.
Copyright BIRN 2007