The Constitutional Court has suspended President Osmani's dissolution decree. The pause is temporary. The constitutional question is not.
by Dren Kryeziu | 9 March 2026
On 9 March, Kosovo's Constitutional Court did something rare and consequential: it stopped the state, again.
In a unanimous interim ruling in case KO72/26, the Court suspended the legal effects of President Vjosa Osmani's decree dissolving the Tenth Assembly, freezing all actions by the presidency and the legislature connected to that decree until 31 March. No election machinery can move. No date can be set. The constitutional clock itself has been paused while the Court decides whether it was ever legitimately started.
The order does not resolve the underlying dispute. It does something narrower and, for now, more important: it forces Kosovo's institutions into a standstill at a moment when momentum itself had become a political weapon.
The trigger
The immediate trigger was the extraordinary session of 5 March, convened to elect a new president.
Two candidates were nominated — Glauk Konjufca and Fatmire Mulhaxha-Kollçaku — but only 66 deputies were present when the Speaker opened the sitting. That fell short of the two-thirds presence threshold she deemed necessary to proceed. The session was interrupted.
The following day, President Osmani issued Decree No. 24/2026, dissolving the Assembly on the basis of Articles 82(1)(3) and 86(2) of the Constitution.
The government of Prime Minister Albin Kurti went to the Constitutional Court the next day. Its argument was not merely procedural. It was that the President had dissolved parliament before the constitutional window for electing a president had actually closed, converting a live constitutional process into a fait accompli.
The constitutional argument
The dispute turns on a clause that appears clear in structure but is contested in application.
Article 82(1)(3) provides that the Assembly shall dissolve if a president is not elected "within sixty days from the date of the beginning of the president's election procedure."
The government's case rests on the claim that the 60-day clock had not yet expired when Osmani acted. The decree came the day after a single failed session. On the government's reading, that is not constitutional exhaustion. It is constitutional acceleration.
The presidency's argument is the mirror image. If the Constitution establishes a deadline and parliament cannot meet it, dissolution is not a discretionary political move but a constitutional consequence. Allowing the process to drift indefinitely would itself violate the Constitution.
Both readings can be defended from the text. That is precisely why the case matters.
The interpretive question
The Court must now determine something the Constitution does not explicitly define: what counts as "the beginning of the president's election procedure" under Article 82 — the trigger point from which the 60-day period runs. Did it begin when the Assembly scheduled the session, when the first vote was attempted, or earlier in the constitutional timetable tied to the expiry of the incumbent's mandate?
The answer — likely a single paragraph in the final judgment — will determine the outcome of this dispute and set the template for every presidential succession crisis Kosovo faces in the future.
Why the Court intervened
The government's filing emphasised the institutional consequences of allowing the decree to operate while the Court deliberated. It argued that the Assembly's legislative capacity was effectively halted, that international agreements worth roughly €121 million were stalled on its agenda, and that the executive risked being reduced to a caretaker administration with sharply constrained authority under the Law on Government. It further argued that once electoral administration began moving — the Central Election Commission mobilised, a date announced, the 45-day constitutional countdown engaged — the resulting situation would be practically irreversible even if the decree were later struck down. The process, once set in motion, would outrun the review.
The Court did not endorse those claims outright. But it found them serious enough to act on. In its interim order it cited the risk of irreparable harm to Kosovo's constitutional order and the need to preserve the democratic functioning of state institutions. The message was clear: constitutional disputes cannot be resolved by institutional momentum.
The deeper constitutional problem
Behind the technical argument lies a deeper structural ambiguity.
Kosovo's Constitution distributes responsibility for resolving presidential deadlock between the Assembly and the President, but it leaves unclear who ultimately determines when the process has failed. The Assembly elects the president. If it fails, the Constitution eventually dissolves it. But the Constitution does not clearly specify who declares that failure final — the Speaker, the President, or simply the passage of time.
That uncertainty has now turned into an institutional conflict between a presidency nearing the end of its term and a government whose parliamentary majority controls the nomination process.
What makes this crisis structurally distinct from ordinary political friction is that both sides can plausibly claim constitutional warrant. Osmani's decree was not an act of raw political aggression; it was grounded in specific constitutional provisions. Kurti's challenge was not mere obstruction; it raised genuine questions about whether those provisions had been correctly applied. The Court is being asked not to identify a clear violation so much as to resolve a genuine ambiguity — and its resolution will, by definition, favour one reading of executive-legislative relations over another. That is an act of constitutional construction, not mere adjudication. The interim freeze suggests the Court intends to treat it as such.
A constitutional pause
For now, the Court has chosen caution over acceleration.
Until 31 March, Kosovo's institutional system is effectively suspended. The Assembly is neither definitively dissolved nor fully operational. The government continues, but under the shadow of possible early elections. The presidency retains its authority but cannot advance the dissolution process.
The Court has created a constitutional holding pattern. It is uncomfortable and unstable, but it serves a clear purpose: preventing one institution's interpretation of the Constitution from becoming the Constitution itself, decided not by judges but by the speed of a decree.
The merits judgment will determine whether President Osmani acted within her constitutional authority or moved prematurely. But the interim decision already says something important about how Kosovo's judiciary understands its own role. In a system where the constitutional text is genuinely contested and the political consequences are difficult to reverse, the Court has decided it will not be outrun.
Case KO72/26 is before the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Kosovo. The interim measure is in force until 31 March 2026, unless extended or superseded by a merits judgment.
