In his modest office in Pristina, Lulzim Shehu shuffles papers belonging to the Community of Tariqa, an organisation that claims to represent some 300,000 Sufi tariqas in Kosovo.
Such a number would make the tariqas the second biggest religious community in Kosovo, a country of some 1.67 million people, most of them ethnic Albanians.
The Community of Tariqa, however, is not recognised by the state as a religious community at all. It has no formal legal status.
Shehu, the secretary of the Community, hoped that would change in 2014 when the government at the time submitted to parliament draft amendments to the 2007 Law on Freedom of Religion.
The amendments sketched out a framework for the registration of religious communities and a form of financial oversight by the state, but they have spent the past 12 years gathering dust.
The current government resubmitted the amendments last month, but they continue to face opposition from Kosovo’s most influential religious bodies – the Islamic Community, the Serbian Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church of Kosovo.
Two political figures and the country’s Ombudsperson, Naim Qelaj, have told BIRN that this opposition has consistently swayed MPs to stall the amendments, raising questions about lawmakers’ commitment to Kosovo’s constitutional status as a secular state.
“All three main religious communities have lobbied and exerted pressure to block the adoption of the amended law,” said opposition Democratic Party of Kosovo, PDK, lawmaker Xhavit Haliti.
Alma Lama, a former MP from the ruling Vetevendosje party and later the Democratic League of Kosovo, LDK, told BIRN: “The Islamic Community prevented the law from passing a second reading [in 2016] and caused its withdrawal from approval; the Orthodox Church has also pushed for less state control.”
The fate of the amendments “primarily reflects the failure of the secular state”, said Shehu.
The established religious communities have flexed their muscles before, most recently in 2022 when parliament rejected a draft Civil Code recognising same-sex civil unions.
Kosovo may be a secular state, Ombudsperson Qelaj told BIRN, but the handling of the Religious Freedom amendments “shows that political parties have been exposed to the influence of religious communities in exchange for preserving their votes”.
“This pattern is evident not only in this case, but also in the failure to adopt the Civil Code.”
The current Law on Religious Freedom, adopted the year before Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, provides no mechanism for the legal recognition of a religious community, but it does name five existing communities: the Islamic Community of Kosovo, the Serbian Orthodox Church, the Catholic Church of Kosovo, the Jewish Community, and the Evangelical Church.
Subsequently, these five have benefitted from tax breaks and customs waivers not available to other unrecognised religious communities.
The rest, according to a 2014 opinion by the Venice Commission, a constitutional advisory body of the Council of Europe, are prevented from “carrying out daily activities – including owning and registering property and vehicles, opening bank accounts, and paying taxes on employees’ salaries”.
This isn’t strictly true for all unrecognised religious communities. The Community of Tariqa, for example, might not have formal legal status, but has managed to open a bank account and obtain a tax ID due to what Kosovo’s Ombudsperson in 2010 called a “legal vacuum”.
Many others settle for the status of a non-governmental organisation, NGO. BIRN identified 56 NGOs as engaged in religious activities and registered mainly with the interior ministry.
“Now we have a fiscal number like all the others, and we are not concerned about recognition,” Shehu told BIRN.
Nevertheless, the United States, the European Union and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, OSCE, have all called for the Law on Freedom of Religion to be amended.
