The Equal Rights for All Coalition, funded by the EU and managed by the European Union Office in Kosovo, yesterday presented the report on “potentially ethnically motivated incidents: challenges in defining and reporting.” The report analyses reporting procedures applied by the police, with a particular focus on potentially ethnically motivated incidents, from the initial investigation and reporting phase to data sharing and harmonization with the judiciary. It also presented and analysed statistics received on inter-ethnic crimes which have gone through criminal proceedings. The head of the Political, Economic and European Integration in the EU Office in Kosovo, Thomas Gnocchi, during his speech noted that the protection of the rights of marginalized groups is an important part of the Stabilisation and Association Agreement. “It is important that communities living in Kosovo, no matter what ethnicity, should feel safe where they live and have confidence in the institutions that protect them. We have solutions for these cases and it is very important that the perpetrators be brought to justice,” Gnocchi said. Meanwhile, the executive director of the European Centre for Minority Issues in Kosovo (ECMI Kosovo), Adrian Zeqiri, who presented the results of the report, said it is very important for Kosovo’s stability the reporting and tracking of such cases. He added that due to the complex nature of ethnically motivated incidents, there is some disagreement as to the exact number of cases reported, whether they were ethnically motivated it or not. Kosovo’s Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs, Valdet Hoxha, said the number of cases of ethnically motivated incidents is small, noting that this is thanks to the work of the Kosovo Police, prosecution and courts, who according to him, have done a good work to address this issue.

As for the results of the report, during the period of 2015, a total of 11 cases were reported, five of them collected from the previous reporting period, and six during the reporting period. But according to the monitoring of these incidents by the OSCE and EULEX, it is known that the total number of reported incidents was 479, a much larger number compared to that reported by institutions, reports the news site.