[legal-professionals] OSCE provides human rights texts to Kosovos courts

PRISTINA, 24 February 2003 - European standards of human rights are on 
their way into the courtrooms of Kosovo. The OSCE will be providing each 
judge, prosecutor, attorney and law professor an Albanian language text 
containing decisions of the European Court of Human Rights.

Ambassador Pascal Fieschi, Head of the OSCE Mission in Kosovo, will today 
hand the first texts of "For a European Public Order" to Mr. Rexhep 
Haximusa, President of the Supreme Court of Kosovo, Mr. Mustafa Shala, 
Public Prosecutor of Kosovo, and Ms. Lirje Osmani, President of the Chamber 
of Advocates.

The European Court, located in Strasbourg, is the international judicial 
body that applies and interprets the European Convention on Human Rights 
(ECHR), a convention made applicable to Kosovo through UNMiK Regulation 
1999/24. All courts in Kosovo are expected to apply the rights guaranteed 
by this convention to cases that come before them.

Although the ECHR has been translated into all major European languages, 
decisions of the European Court, which interpret the ECHR, have not been 
available in all these languages. This has hampered the ability of local 
legal professionals to learn about and apply the ECHR. To overcome this 
problem, the OSCE has been working together with the Criminal Defence 
Resource Centre to obtain the texts of court decisions in the Albanian and 
Serbian languages.

The cases contained in this text were translated into Albanian by the 
Albanian Centre for Human Rights in Tirana, Albania. The 40 cases in the 
book were selected by international experts because of their important 
contribution to the understanding of the ECHR by legal professionals

The OSCE Mission hopes to locate and provide a similar resource for Serbian 
speaking legal professionals in the near future.


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