Overview
The Republic of Kosovo holds a special position in German extradition practice. Despite its geographical location in the Western Balkans and its EU accession perspective — Kosovo submitted an application for EU membership on 15 December 2022 — Kosovo is a member neither of the Council of Europe nor a party to the European Convention on Extradition (EuAlÜbk). Nor is there a bilateral extradition treaty with the Federal Republic of Germany.
Extraditions between Germany and Kosovo are therefore carried out on a treaty-less basis directly under the provisions of the Act on International Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters (IRG, Sections 1 ff.). Practice shows that Kosovar requests are granted in the majority of cases; in 2020, according to the Federal Office of Justice (Bundesamt für Justiz, BfJ), ten of twelve requests were decided positively.
German citizens are not extradited to Kosovo as a third state, pursuant to Article 16(2) sentence 1 of the Basic Law; for EU citizens, the ECJ case law on Petruhhin and Pisciotti applies.
Legal basis
Extradition to Kosovo is governed exclusively by the general provisions of the IRG. The relevant provisions are in particular Sections 2 ff. IRG (requirements), Sections 6, 7 IRG (political and military offenses), Section 8 IRG (death penalty), and Section 73 IRG (essential principles of the German legal order).
There is no extradition treaty between Germany and Kosovo. Since the Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA) of 16 April 2016, the EU has created a framework with Kosovo that nonetheless leaves extradition law unaffected. The EULEX mission likewise has no direct effect on the bilateral extradition procedure.
In practice, Kosovar requests frequently proceed via Interpol alerts (Red Notice). It should be noted that Kosovo has only had Interpol access via its own NCB since 2018; earlier alerts ran through the UNMIK administration.
Country-specific issues in Kosovo
The Kosovar judiciary has been under construction since the declaration of independence in 2008. The EU rule-of-law mission EULEX is accompanying the process. In the assessment of European authorities, detention conditions are regarded as adequate; in 2021 Denmark announced it would rent prison places in Kosovo — an indication of the standard achieved.
The death penalty was already abolished in 2001 (still under UN administration); Section 8 IRG is therefore not applicable.
The situation is complex in the case of offenses connected to the Kosovo war and the post-war period. The special court for war crimes in The Hague (Kosovo Specialist Chambers, KSC) may have jurisdiction in individual cases; requests arising from this context must be carefully distinguished from regular Kosovar requests.
A further special point: in 2024 Germany voted against Kosovo's accession to the Council of Europe, among other reasons because of the dispute over the association of municipalities of the Serbian minority in the north of the country. The legal situation remains unchanged pending any eventual normalization.
Detention conditions and the human-rights review
Detention conditions in Kosovo are monitored by the inspectorate of the Ministry of Justice as well as — within the scope of the EULEX mandates — externally. While the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) does not have Kosovo directly within its remit, because Kosovo is not a member of the Council of Europe, the standards are nonetheless explicitly aligned with the European Prison Rules.
Article 3 ECHR is not directly applicable in Kosovo. Decisive for the German extradition procedure is Section 73 IRG, which requires compliance with the essential principles of the German legal order — including the minimum human-rights standards — as a precondition for extradition.
Clear bars under Section 73 IRG relating to torture or inhuman treatment are regularly not assumed by German Higher Regional Court case law in the case of Kosovo. Individual circumstances — the identity and group affiliation of the requested person (e.g. the Serbian minority), the specific prison — must, however, be reviewed.
Lines of defense
Since Kosovar requests are as a rule granted, the individual case-specific defense takes on particular importance. Promising approaches are:
- Rule of specialty (Section 11 IRG): securing the limitation to the subject matter of the request, in particular where there are several charges.
- Dual criminality (Section 3 IRG): particular attention should be paid to offenses from the post-war legal framework that have no clear equivalent in German law.
- Double jeopardy (ne bis in idem) (Section 9 IRG): comparison with parallel German proceedings and any UNMIK/EULEX proceedings.
- Political and ethnic persecution (Section 6(2) IRG): to be substantiated in individual cases for requested persons from ethnic minorities.
- Interpol deletion: Kosovar Red Notices should be reviewed for their legitimacy; complaints to the CCF have prospects of success in individual cases.
- Petruhhin constellation: for EU citizens of other EU member states, the home state must be informed.
Legal representation in Kosovo extradition proceedings
An extradition case is a specialized mutual-legal-assistance procedure that goes beyond classic criminal defense. Engaging a defense lawyer specialized in extradition law at an early stage is regularly decisive — not only after the formal extradition arrest warrant has been issued, but already from the moment of an arrest based on an Interpol alert, an SIS alert or a European Arrest Warrant.
As a Certified Specialist in Criminal Law with a focus on extradition law, I advise and represent affected persons nationwide before the competent Higher Regional Courts and in constitutional complaint proceedings before the Federal Constitutional Court.