Today the Kosovo Women’s Network (KWN) shared with the European Union Office its commentary, A Gender Reading of the European Commission’s Kosovo 2024 Report, compiled together with the Kosovar Gender Studies Centre. It examines the extent to which the European Commission’s (EC) 2024 Report attends to gender equality and includes recommendations provided by women’s rights civil society organisations (WCSOs). The commentary concludes that the 2024 Report shows a marked decline in gender mainstreaming compared to prior years. While this may be due in part to the new, shorter format of the Report, several opportunities existed to better integrate attention to gender equality across the Report’s chapters.  

KWN found that a mere 3% of the Report’s chapters satisfactorily attended to gender equality, while 24% did so partially, and 73% ignored it altogether. The Report did not attend sufficiently to the need for gender equality impact assessments to inform legislative reforms or to institutionalise gender-responsive budgeting.  Several chapters did not contain any gender perspective though they could have, such as on Good Neighbourly Relations and Regional Cooperation; Normalisation of Relations between Kosovo and Serbia; European Standards for Internal Market, The Green Agenda and Sustainable Connectivity, Resources, Agriculture and Cohesion, and External Relations; Relations Between the EU and Kosovo; and Statistical Data. The lack of attention to the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) Agenda in security, Kosovo-Serbia relations, and Kosovo-EU relations is particularly concerning. The Report often lacked sex-disaggregated data and an intersectional approach, such as related to gender and rural inhabitants, children, Serbs, Roma, Ashkali, Egyptians, and persons with disabilities.  

The report does attend to gender equality with regard to the judiciary, fundamental rights. the fight against organised crime, social policy and employment, and science and research. 

However, only 43% of KWN’s recommendations were included, a steep drop from 70% in 2023. 

KWN calls for the EC to include in future reports: improved intersectional gender analysis and sex-disagregated data in all chapters; recommendations to instituitonalise gender-responsive budgeting as part of public finance reforms; improved attention to the WPS Agenda and gender responsive conflict analysis; address of gender-based violence in the Rule of Law and social policy chapters with concrete recommendations; pressure for the Government to publish regularly administrative sex-disaggregated data and to finalise the Gender Equality Index; ensure affirmative measures based on the Law on Gender Equality are considered in merit-based recruitment; promote a gender-responsive digital transition and address legal reforms to better address gender-based cyberviolence; and continue consulting WCSOs on how to better integrate a gender perspective in the EU Accession process and the EC Kosovo Report. 

Here’s the full Commentary and a summary.