Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on March 24, 2025 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Remzje Istrefi. Moderated by Tanya Domi.
Although Kosovo is not a ratifying state of the Council of Europe Convention on Prevention and Combatting of Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence, known as the Istanbul Convention, and is not a member state of the Council of Europe, the Convention is directly applied in the Kosovar legal order and has priority over other laws and acts. On September 25, 2020, the Assembly of the Republic of Kosovo, through constitutional amendments, added the Istanbul Convention to a list of international instruments enshrined in Article 22 of the Constitution. Eight international instruments related to human rights have been implemented into the Kosovar legal order; they apply directly to the Republic of Kosovo and have priority, in the case of conflict, over the provisions of laws and acts of other public institutions.
Consequently, the Constitutional Court of Kosovo has issued its first cases deciding on the obligations of state authorities established in Articles 18 (General Obligations), 50 (Immediate response, prevention, and protection), and 51 (Risk assessment and risk management) of the Istanbul Convention.
Dr. Remzje Istrefi is Judge at the Constitutional Court of Kosovo and Associated Professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Prishtina. She is the winner of the 2024 Human Rights Defender Prize, awarded by the Global Summit on Constitutional Law. She holds a L.L.M. from University of Notre Dame, and a Ph.D. where she researched “The Responsibility of International Organizations for Human Rights Violation – Kosovo Case.” She is a postdoctoral fellow at the Law School of Graz University in Austria. In 2008, Remzije Istrefi was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship at Duke University, She is the author of university textbooks and articles in different international journals.