Pristina, December 15th, 2023 – The Ombudsperson has published a report regarding the quality of the translation of legal acts and their linguistic inconsistency, especially in the Serbian language. The reason for the publication of this report was the fact that during the daily work at the Ombudsperson’s Institution, non-identical language versions were encountered in a number of legal and by-laws, even in the Constitution itself – in the official language versions – Albanian and Serbian.

These differences include substantive, terminological, grammatical, spelling and typographical errors, which mean completely or partially inappropriate translation of words from the Albanian language into the Serbian language, the lack of translations of parts of the text, as well as the addition of parts of sentences that do not exist in the original text.

The Ombudsperson recalls that the Constitution of the Republic of Kosovo defines that the official languages are Albanian and Serbian. The Constitution further states that everyone is equal before the law and that everyone has the right to equal legal protection, without discrimination, among other things, the basis of language. In such situations when the versions of the languages in the normative acts are not identical, it can lead to situations where the interpretation becomes complex, subjective and inevitably leads to unequal treatment.

Therefore, the Ombudsperson made recommendations for:

The Assembly of the Republic of Kosovo as soon as possible to approve the Draft Law no. 06/L-030 on Legal Acts and thereby provide the legal basis for harmonizing and correcting linguistic or technical errors in legal acts in case of inconsistencies between official languages; and,

The Government of the Republic of Kosovo to take the necessary measures to ensure the harmonization of legislation and the correction of essential, linguistic, terminological, grammatical and spelling errors, either in the existing language versions of the laws, or those in the drafting process, in which case the full reliability of the different language versions of the law will be achieved.

The report in English language soon at www.oik-rks.org