FOR A SEMI-PRESIDENTIAL REGIME: Where is the New-Born Republic Heading? Policy Report No. 01/2011
Publisher: Group for Legal and Political Studies (GLPS), Kosovo Date: October 2012 Volume: 22 pages, pdf Description As a state established under certain international supervisory conditions, Kosovo drafted its first state constitution in a process both straightforward and opaque. The parliamentarian political parties managed and owned the constitutional drafting process, starting immediately after the revelation of the Ahtisaari Settlement Proposal. This control kept this process essentially closed to public opinion and citizen participation, although, in late 2007 and 2008, the parties did organize a limited number of formal debates around Kosovo to discuss the choices. One can sum up this process as one wherein a politically headed commission supervised the constitutional drafting process in which it insisted upon the inclusion of certain partisan-favoured solutions in the new state Constitution. The resulting Constitution created a consociational model of democracy for Kosovo—quite less rigid than that of Bosnia—and logically and substantially based on the Ahtisaarian prescriptions. Nevertheless, the constitutional status of the President of the Republic carries no value of consociation; instead, it falls well within the margins of intergrationism.