A number of judges and prosecutors who joined the mass resignation of Kosovo Serbs from state bodies in 2022 reportedly want their old jobs back.
Adelina Ahmeti
Kosovo Serb police officers remove their uniforms when resigning in November 2022. Photo: BIRN/Adelina Ahmeti
Nearly four years after Serbs collectively resigned from Kosovo’s institutions, some Serb judges and prosecutors have filed requests to return to their posts in the Serb-majority north of the country, according to Kosovo’s judicial authorities.
Arian Gashi, chair of the Kosovo Prosecutorial Council, KPC, confirmed to BIRN that some prosecutors are seeking to return.
“The KPC started receiving similar notifications from prosecutors and support staff from the Serb community. Once we have received all of them, the KPC will discuss them and decide how to handle them,” Gashi said,
Sources told BIRN that the Kosovo Judicial Council has also received requests to return to work from several Serb judges. However, the exact number is not known.
Many Kosovo Serbs resigned on November 5, 2022 from state posts in Kosovo’s four Serb-majority northern municipalities, claiming that EU-mediated agreements between Serbia and Kosovo were being breached.
The resignations followed a meeting in the town of Zvecan organised by the Belgrade-backed party representing Kosovo Serbs, Srpska Lista.
Srpska Lista said that the mayors of Serb-majority municipalities, councillors, MPs, judges, prosecutors, judicial staff and Kosovo Police officers had all quit their jobs. During the meeting in Zvecan, Serb police officers symbolically took off their Kosovo police uniforms to applause from the participants.
The then leader of Srpska Lista, Goran Rakic, announcing the boycott of Kosovo’s institutions, said these decisions would remain in effect until an Association of Serb-Majority Municipalities, as agreed in the EU-facilitated Kosovo-Serbia dialogue, was established.
The move came two days after then regional director of the Kosovo Police for the Serb-majority north, Nenad Djuric, was suspended on suspicion of calling for resistance. Djuric had claimed that police in the north would not implement the government’s decision to issue reprimands to drivers of vehicles with licence plates issued by Serbia, which are considered illegal by the Kosovo authorities.
Two days after the mass resignations, on November 7, 2022, the Kosovo Judicial Council held a meeting to address the situation in the north arising from the resignations. However, the Council did not address the actual resignations as an assessment report on the matter was required first.
“The Council did not review the resignations of the judges and support staff at today’s meeting, as there will first be an assessment report from the competent authorities regarding the accountability of all parties involved in the recent activities linked to the situation,” the Council’s statement read.
After the boycott took effect, ethnic Albanians were elected as mayors in the north in extraordinary local elections in April 2023, on very low turnouts, after Serbs stayed away from the polls.
After these new mayors took office, the security situation in the north deteriorated. Clashes between protesters and NATO peacekeeping forces led to around 93 NATO personnel being injured, with one having a leg amputated.
Kosovo authorities also shut down a series of so-called “parallel” Serb institutions – services run outside government control – in the north of the country.
The European Union imposed some sanctions on Kosovo in June 2023 in response to the worsening security situation. These measures were lifted in March 2026.
Ethnic Serb mayors retook power in the four Serb-majority municipalities in December 2025. During the election campaign, Srpska Lista admitted it had made a mistake in urging Serbs to abandon Kosovo institutions in 2022 – but said the decision had at least attracted the attention of the international community.
