Serbian people is an identity, and the Constitution does not deny it. Serb community is a constitutional capacity, with the seats, the post and the prerogative. On Wednesday a deputy invoked the first while exercising the second.
Kosovo Dispatch Legal Desk | 10 September 2026
The Constitution of the Republic of Kosovo opens, "We, the People of Kosovo," and never departs from the proposition. Sovereignty belongs to the people and is exercised through elected representatives (Article 2); the Assembly is elected directly by the people (Article 63); each deputy is a representative of the people and bound by no other mandate (Article 70); the President represents the unity of the people (Articles 4 and 83). The noun is singular in each provision, and nowhere is it qualified. An Albanian people, a Serbian people, a Turkish, Bosniak, Roma, Ashkali, Egyptian or Gorani people: none of these appears in the text, and one people does.
Article 3 says what it is made of, a multiethnic society "composed of Albanians and the other communities." Read alone, the sentence leaves room for an argument that Albanians stand apart from the communities rather than among them. Article 78 removes the room. The Committee on the Rights and Interests of Communities sits in thirds: deputies holding Serb-community seats, deputies holding the seats of the other non-majority communities, and members "from the majority community represented in the Assembly." Majority and minority belong to the same constitutional category, with different guarantees attached to each.
Article 57 supplies the definition, and it begins with the word an opponent would reach for. Residents belonging to the same "national or ethnic, linguistic or religious group," traditionally present in Kosovo, are a community (Article 57.1). The national group enters the text and leaves it as a community, with the rights attached to the second word: membership by individual choice, without disadvantage for choosing or declining (Article 57.2); the freedom to express, advance and develop identity as a community (Article 57.3); and in Article 59 the practical list, language, education, symbols, media, personal names, contacts across borders.
Representation is drafted the same way. Article 64 guarantees ten Assembly seats to the Serb community and ten to the other communities, by name and by number; Article 67 reserves one deputy-speaker post to a deputy holding a Serb-community seat and another to the remaining communities; Article 96 guarantees ministers and deputy ministers by community; Article 81 gives deputies holding community seats a double majority over laws of vital interest and Article 144 gives them a blocking share over amendment. In every case the constitutional entitlement belongs to a community or to representatives identified through that community. Not one belongs to a separate people. A deputy in a guaranteed seat holds it, under Article 64, for the representation of a community, and serves, under Article 70, as a representative of the people. There is no third representative capacity in the text.
None of this tells anyone what to call themselves in a church or from a rostrum. Article 40 protects expression and Article 57.3 protects identity, so a deputy may belong to, speak of and identify with the Serbian people. What the Constitution regulates is capacity. A deputy cannot exercise a constitutional prerogative in the capacity of a representative of the Serbian people, because the Constitution creates no such constitutional capacity and vests no institutional prerogative in it. The power exercised on Wednesday came from seats guaranteed to the Serb community, and the written nomination made on those seats was valid.
On Wednesday a deputy rose in the Assembly and nominated "in the name of the Serbian people," citing in the same breath the seats reserved for the Serb community. Both vocabularies were in one sentence, and only one of them was in the Constitution.
