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EUKOJUST presents the VPAO Assessment Report

The EUKOJUST project promotes good practices and empowers victims from vulnerable communities to approach and inquire services of Victims Protection and Assistance Office (VPAO). The Assessment Report presented today to Head of VPAO, Mr. Basri Kastrati, Victims’ Advocates, members of KPC, representatives from civil society and international organizations, highlighted the importance of strengthening and professionalizing the Office in charge of representing and protecting the victims’ rights.

The report, drafted by EUKOJUST Access to Justice Expert, Alina Matache and EUKOJUST Legal Advisor Nita Bejta, provided several recommendations such as tailoring and planning strategic training with a view to specialize the VAs on specific fields, providing adequate human resources and facilities to support the victims on one-to-one assistance, enabling gender balance in every regional office, providing mandatory training focused on victim-centered approach, introducing a system of quality control through the monitoring and evaluation of services provision, providing adequate information campaigns throughout the year, as well as introducing a form of complaints or grievances procedures, where victims or other actors can introduce a complaint for non-compliance with standards.

EUKOJUST is committed to provide future tailored capacity building activities focused on victim-centered approach, to bring closer the citizens to state institutions as to seek protection.

The project is about working with empathy in a coordinated manner with all institutions in the interest of improving access to justice for vulnerable people and marginalized groups, in accordance with victims’ individual needs.

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Workshop on the Draft Administrative Instruction on Standards of Drafting of Legal Acts and the review of the Draft Law on Legal Acts

21-22 September 2021
Sirius Hotel

EUKOJUST has been working with the Legal Office within the Office of the Prime Minister (LO-OPM) for the last four months to review the existing rules on standards of drafting of legislative acts in Kosovo. Following a thorough analysis provided by EUKOJUST on the Administrative Instruction on Standards of Drafting of Normative Acts (AI), EUKOJUST provided the LO-OPM with a new draft AI with the view of aligning it with the Draft Law on Legal Acts. The latter one has received a positive opinion from the Venice Commission and it seeks to regulate for the first time in Kosovo the hierarchy of legal acts, the types of legal acts, issues of delegation with respect to sub-legal acts, consolidation and correction of legislation and main principles of drafting of legal acts. The Draft AI introduces several novelties such as the main rules on the types of acts which seek to amend legislation, rules on the drafting of legal opinions, rules on the delegation in respect of sub-legal acts, rules on approximation with the EU acquis, rules on citation and reference on other legislation, rules on consolidation of legislation etc. The Draft AI is conceptualized as an instruction accompanied by a Manual on Standards of Drafting of Legal Acts which includes more detailed rules and concrete examples for all the topics covered by the AI.

Given the importance of these two pieces of legislation, EUKOJUST and the LO-OPM organized a two-days workshop to intensively work on the finalization of these two pieces of legislation. This is the first one in a series of workshops planned to be organized with the final aim of reforming the standards of legal drafting, establishing a methodology for legal consolidation and initiating a process of legal cleaning in Kosovo.