Kosovo

The Coalition’s position. This state agreed to receive people who are not its nationals, moved against their will, under a programme United States federal courts have found punitive and whose purpose was stated publicly before the agreement was made. On the Coalition’s position it has knowingly facilitated that programme, and the wrong is complete at the moment of agreement. Nothing on this page is offered as mitigation. What a receiving state agrees to.

What has happened

Kosovo agreed on 11 June 2025 to take people removed from the United States who are not its nationals. The agreement was made by an exchange of diplomatic notes. Neither government published them. Their terms became public because Refugees International and Human Rights First asked for them under freedom of information law, which is a different thing from disclosure, and worth knowing when you are told that an arrangement is transparent.

Why the count is uncertain, and whose uncertainty it is.

The Associated Press reported the arrival in the singular. Prime Minister Albin Kurti, asked about it on Kosovar television, said that if he was not mistaken, one or two of them were there. The trackers followed him. So the vagueness is not the monitors’ vagueness. It is the vagueness of the head of the government that received the people, speaking about how many human beings had arrived in his country six months into an arrangement he had signed. The Coalition records both counts and does not reconcile them.

Associated Press, 12 December 2025. Kurti to Kanal10, reported 12 December 2025. United States Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, Third Country Deportations tracker.

What has happened to them.

Nothing is recorded. Not their nationalities, not whether they held protection ordered by a United States court, not where they were housed, not whether they were detained on arrival, not whether they are still in Kosovo. Two monitoring projects follow this arrangement and neither has been able to say. This is the largest hole on this page, and the Coalition would rather print the hole than fill it with an assumption.

What the record says about Kosovo itself

The most important finding about Kosovo was made in a case against Sweden.

On 8 November 2024 the United Nations Committee against Torture decided a complaint by a Turkish national whom Sweden proposed to remove to Kosovo. The Committee held that the removal would breach article 3 of the Convention against Torture, because in Kosovo he would face a real risk of being forcibly transferred to Türkiye and tortured there. The risk the Committee identified was not a risk of what Kosovo would do to him. It was a risk of where Kosovo would let him be taken.

The Committee went further, and said plainly what Kosovo is bound by. It recorded that Kosovo is not a party to the Refugee Convention, nor to any regional or international convention on human rights, and that it is therefore not bound under international law by article 3, or by any other provision of the Convention against Torture. That sentence is the single most useful thing on this page for a lawyer arguing in the country doing the sending.

Committee against Torture, M.T. v. Sweden, Communication No. 1109/2021, UN Doc. CAT/C/81/D/1109/2021, adopted 8 November 2024. The full decision is linked below and should be read rather than relied on through this summary.

The six men.

The Committee was not reasoning from theory. On 29 March 2018 six men were seized in Kosovo and handed to Turkish intelligence officers at Pristina airport, flown to Türkiye, and imprisoned. Their names are on the record: Kahraman Demirez, Mustafa Erdem, Hasan Hüseyin Günakan, Yusuf Karabina, Osman Karakaya and Cihan Özkan. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention examined what happened to them and adopted an opinion in August 2020, two years and five months later. The Working Group noted that it received no response from Kosovo.

Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, Opinion No. 47/2020, adopted at the eighty-eighth session, 24 to 28 August 2020.

What the two State Department editions say, and what the second one dropped.

The 2024 edition contains a sentence the 2023 edition does not. On torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, it states that there were credible reports government officials employed such practices. That is the more recent finding and the stronger one, and it is quoted at the top of this page.

The same edition is eighteen pages long where the 2023 edition ran to forty-five, and the material it lost is material a person in custody would want. The whole section on prison and detention centre conditions is gone, and with it the list of bodies recorded in 2023 as having access to places of detention: the Ombudsperson, the European Union rule of law mission, the Medical Inspectorate, the Kosova Rehabilitation Centre for Torture Victims, and the Center for the Defense of Human Rights and Freedoms. The 2023 figures on complaints of physical mistreatment by police, forty complaints with twenty-five dismissed on the merits, have no successor.

The Coalition treats the change as a change in what the United States chose to report, not as a change in what happens in Kosovo. Where this page needs the detail, it cites the 2023 edition and says so.

United States Department of State, Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, Kosovo, 2023 and 2024 editions, both linked below.

What binds Kosovo, and what does not

Kosovo is not a member of the United Nations. It does not appear among the parties to the Convention against Torture in the depositary records. It is not a member of the Council of Europe and is not a party to the European Convention on Human Rights in its own right. The practical consequence is short and hard: there is no international body to which a person in Kosovo can complain. No communication to the Committee against Torture. No application to the European Court of Human Rights. Nothing.

Kosovo did something unusual about this in its own constitution, and it matters. Article 22 makes a list of international instruments, including the European Convention on Human Rights and the Convention against Torture, directly applicable in Kosovo, and gives them priority over provisions of laws and other acts of public institutions where the two conflict. Article 53 requires that rights be interpreted consistently with the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights.

So the standards apply in Kosovo even though the machinery does not reach it. A Kosovar court is required to apply the prohibition on refoulement. What is missing is the outside body that could tell it that it got the answer wrong. The substance is domesticated and the enforcement is not.

Under article 113(7) an individual may refer a violation by a public authority to the Constitutional Court, but only after exhausting all legal remedies provided by law. That is the last door, not the first.

If a person is held.

Kosovo has an asylum procedure. Under the Law on Asylum a person may be detained on an individual assessment, including to verify identity or to effect a return; detention ordered by a court cannot exceed two months and cannot outlast the asylum procedure; and an appeal lies to the Basic Court within seven working days, but the appeal does not suspend execution of the decision. Under the Law on Foreigners, detention of up to six months, extendable to twelve, is recorded at the detention centre for foreigners at Vranidoll, capacity seventy-five.

Work is remote. An asylum applicant acquires the right to a profit-making activity only nine months after applying, and only if no first-instance decision has issued through no fault of their own. A person put on a plane in December and told that Kosovo will help them go home is not going to reach that date.

Law No. 06/L-026 on Asylum, articles 32 to 34. Law No. 04/L-219 on Foreigners. Global Detention Project, Kosovo profile. Constitution of the Republic of Kosovo, articles 22, 53, 54 and 113(7). All linked below.

The first days

There is no regional court for Kosovo and no international complaint body. Everything below happens inside the country, and the sequence matters more than it would elsewhere, because the last domestic door has to be reached before the Constitutional Court will open.

Who is reachable in Kosovo

The Coalition looked for an organisation in Kosovo providing legal help to non-citizens facing removal and could not confirm one. The Center for the Defense of Human Rights and Freedoms is named in the 2023 United States report as having unannounced access to detention, and no current contact details for it could be verified. Civil Rights Program Kosovo maintains an asylum information page connected to the refugee agency, and its own contact page returned an error when checked on 9 September 2026. Neither is listed above, because a number that does not answer is worse than no number. Investigating.

The routes, and the one that looks open and is not

The Committee against Torture. Closed. Kosovo is not a party to the Convention, so there is no individual communication against Kosovo, and no article 22 declaration is possible.

The European Court of Human Rights. Closed. Kosovo is not a member of the Council of Europe and is not a party to the European Convention in its own right, so no application lies against Kosovo. This is worth stating carefully to anyone who assumes that a European territory carries European remedies. It does not.

The Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture. Closed. Kosovo is not a party to the Optional Protocol. The National Preventive Mechanism inside the Ombudsperson exists as a matter of Kosovar law rather than as a treaty obligation.

The Constitutional Court of Kosovo. Open, last. Article 113(7) allows an individual to refer a violation by a public authority, after exhausting all legal remedies provided by law. Because article 22 makes the Convention against Torture and the European Convention directly applicable with priority over ordinary law, this is the forum in which the refoulement argument can actually be made.

The Human Rights Review Panel. This one looks open and is not, and the Coalition sets it out because a family that finds it will lose weeks. The Panel takes complaints of human rights violations by the European Union rule of law mission in the conduct of its executive mandate, within six months. The mission no longer exercises an executive mandate; its role was renewed in June 2025 as monitoring, mentoring and advising. The Panel is not a route against the Kosovo authorities. It is a route against a mission that no longer does the thing complained of.

The Police Inspectorate of Kosovo. Open for criminal conduct by police officers, which is a narrower question than treatment in custody, and narrower still than removal.

For officials who administer this

The Coalition addresses this section to the people inside the Kosovar administration who receive these files, and it is not written as a warning. Article 22 of your constitution already gives you the instrument. The Committee against Torture has said, in terms, that Kosovo is bound by no human rights convention, and it said so as a reason why a person should not be sent to you. That finding sits uncomfortably beside a constitution that adopted those same conventions voluntarily and gave them priority over ordinary law. The gap between the two is not a legal puzzle for anyone outside Kosovo to solve. It is available to be closed by a Kosovar court applying its own article 22, and by officials who ask, before a person is moved on, where they are being moved on to.

The dated record

Every entry below is a fact with a source.

What is not established

The nationality of anyone transferred to Kosovo from the United States. Whether any of them held withholding of removal or protection under the Convention against Torture ordered by a United States court. Where they were housed, whether they were detained, and whether they are still in the country. Whether anyone has been moved onward from Kosovo since December 2025. The text of the diplomatic notes, which neither government has published. Whether the arrangement survived 11 June 2026.

The Coalition writes Investigating rather than none found, because the second phrase reads as though a question has been answered when it has only been asked.

What this page does not yet carry

A search of the case law of the Constitutional Court of Kosovo for any decision applying article 22 to a foreign national facing removal. If such a decision exists it would be the most useful thing on this page, and the Coalition has not yet done that search to exhaustion.

The Council of Europe treaty office record on the European Convention was not reachable when this page was compiled, and the statement that Kosovo is not a party rests on the Committee against Torture’s own finding rather than on the depositary table. The Coalition prefers the depositary and will replace the citation when it can reach it.

If you can correct anything here, or you know of an organisation in Kosovo that helps people in this position, the Coalition wants to hear it.

Sources

Every source used on this page, linked so it can be read in full rather than through the summaries above.

United Nations. Committee against Torture, M.T. v. Sweden, Communication No. 1109/2021, CAT/C/81/D/1109/2021, adopted 8 November 2024. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, Opinion No. 47/2020. United Nations Treaty Collection, status of the Convention against Torture, in which Kosovo does not appear.

United States Department of State. Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2023, Kosovo. Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2024, Kosovo.

Kosovo law. Constitution of the Republic of Kosovo, articles 22, 53, 54 and 113(7). Law No. 06/L-026 on Asylum, articles 32 to 34.

Monitoring. United States Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, Third Country Deportations tracker. Third Country Deportation Watch, Kosovo, maintained by Human Rights First and Refugees International. Global Detention Project, Kosovo.

The arrangement, and the reporting of it. Radio Evropa e Lirë, 11 June 2025, carrying the Albanian text of the government decision. Prishtina Insight. Radio Free Europe. Türkiye Today, 12 December 2025, reporting the Prime Minister on the number who had arrived.

Institutions named on this page. Ombudsperson Institution of Kosovo. Kosova Rehabilitation Centre for Torture Victims. Human Rights Review Panel, whose limits are set out above. Council of the European Union, 17 June 2025, on the renewed mandate of the rule of law mission.

Compiled 9 September 2026. Where this page summarises a decision or a report, the full document is linked above and should be read rather than relied on through the summary.