Discrimination in Law or in Fact? Laws applied to discriminate against Albanians

A 54-year-old lawyer and former judge of the Commercial Court in Djakova before it was dissolved in 1991, Mr. Hasan Pruthi testified about the application of laws in ways that discriminated against Kosovo Albanians. The two major laws he addressed were the law regulating new business registration and a special law on trading (buying and selling) real property.

After 13 years as a judge of the Commercial Court in Djakova, Mr. Pruthi and about 40 court employees lost their jobs when, in 1991, Parliament passed the law abolishing the court. While Serb employees immediately found new employment, Mr. Pruthi was 'on the street' for two years before he was able to. Mr. Pruthi testified that the court was dissolved though it had recently been commended by a Commission of the Minister of Justice. Its work, including the registration of new businesses, was transferred to the Commercial Court in Pristina, where citizens from the Djakova municipality now had to apply. According to Mr. Pruthi, the Pristina Court either issued an immediate oral denial or returned the applications of Albanians, while Serb applications were granted expeditiously.

Mr. Milosevic contended that because the law applied to everyone equally, it could not be considered discriminatory. There are, of course, two ways in which laws can be discriminatory: 1) they are written in a manner which discriminates against an identifiable group (e.g. women cannot work longer than 40 hours per week) and 2) while not discriminatory as written, they are applied in a manner which unlawfully discriminates among groups. Mr. Pruthi alleged that the Business Registration law fell under the second category.

Mr. Milosevic also tried to undermine the witness's testimony by pointing out that a law provides that when a court fails to act on an application within a specified period of time, the application is deemed granted. Mr. Pruthi testified that the Court orally rejected applications, which would make the rule inapplicable as well as not allowing for an appeal which requires that the order be written. In other cases, Mr. Pruthi testified that the court summarily refused to accept the applications and immediately returned them to the applicants. Again, in such a case, the rule on licensure through inaction would not apply.

The second major law that Mr. Pruthi testified about discriminated against Kosovo Albanians was the Law on Immobile Property, passed in 1998. That law prohibited buying and selling of real property without the consent of the Minister of Finance. Like the law on business registration, it applied throughout the country and to all groups equally. However, Mr. Pruthi maintained that applications of Albanians were 'prolonged and not settled for a long time, while Serb applications were settled immediately.' In addition, he said that a large number of Albanian applications were rejected. In this way, he said, the law was applied in a discriminatory manner.

Mr. Milosevic himself read the purpose of the law into the court record, 'Article 3 of that law says the Minister of Finance shall approve of buying and selling immobile property when it does not affect the ethnic pattern and when it does not cause anxiety and uncertainty or inequality of rights.' The purpose of the law was to maintain ethnic population balance in an area, and, though not stated, the focus was Kosovo. Oddly, the witness did not explain how the law worked in practice, which is what made it so objectionable to the Albanian population. In effect, Albanian proposals to sell to Serbs would be approved while Serb sales to Albanians would not be, the goal being to assure that the Albanian population of Kosovo did not grow in proportion to the Serb population. The law could be applied to promote the opposite. The testimony unfortunately failed to elucidate this issue.