Serbia Not Transparent Over Kosovo Deals, Report Says

The process of implementing EU-led Serbia-Kosovo agreements on the Serbian side is marked by a lack of transparency, while much of the decision-making is in the hands of Srpska List, a Kosovo Serbian party backed by the Belgrade government.

These are the results of a report published last week by a Belgrade think tank, the Bureau for Social Research, BIRODI.

After studying the implementation of 26 measures, BIRODI established that 12 have not been implemented at all, nine are completely fulfilled and five are just partially met.

The main achievements were the successful conduct of the local elections in 2013 in Kosovo, which included municipalities in the mainly Serbian north of Kosovo, implementation of co-called IBM agreement, that provides for jointly managed border crossings, and the growth of sense of safety and freedom of movement among Kosovo Serbs.

However, the report said that the decision-making process regarding the implementation of Brussels agreement remained overly secretive.

Meetings about implementation of the agreement are not public, while citizens, civil society and political parties outside the ruling coalition are not included in the process.

"The process itself is not transparent, which raises a question about its legitimacy," Pavle Dimitrijevic, from BIRODI, said on Thursday.

BIRODI urged the Serbian government to ensure that all interested parties are involved in the decision-making process, and that the public is well informed on all relevant decisions.

It also says the EU, which began mediating the first talks when they started in 2011, should take a more active role in implementation of the agreement, instead of just monitoring it.

Serbia does not recognise the independence of its...