Ten Years on: The Exhaustion Principle and the Practice of the Constitutional Court of Kosovo as the Final Authority for Protection of Human Rights

Ten years after the establishment of the Constitutional Court of Kosovo, this paper aims to examine the concept of exhaustion of legal remedies in Kosovo judicial system where an individual has brought a case claiming violation of human rights guaranteed by the Constitution. The paper will focus on analyzing what constitutes an effective legal remedy including ordinary and extraordinary remedies for the purposes of submitting a constitutional complaint with the Constitutional Court. This work is based on the case-law of the Constitutional Court and tries to explain all legal steps that must be observed before submitting a constitutional complaint regarding exhaustion requirement. Furthermore, it will delve deeper into this concept by distinguishing the importance of formal and substantive exhaustion of legal remedies, the interconnectedness of formal and substantive exhaustion of legal remedies and the distinction between them as developed by the case-law of the Constitutional Court. It will conclude by summarizing main characteristics of the concept of exhaustion of legal remedies in Kosovo as it is established by the practice of the Constitutional Court.