President of Kosovo Constitutional Court speaks at HLS

On Feb. 4, more than 70 Harvard Law School students, faculty, and other members of the Harvard community gathered in Wasserstein Hall to hear Enver Hasani, president of the Constitutional Court of Kosovo, speak on “European Self-Determination and the Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice on Kosovo.”

The nine-member Constitutional Court of Kosovo was established in 2009 as the final authority on the interpretation of the Republic of Kosovo’s constitution. Before his appointment to the court, Hasani was the head of Kosovo’s newly established Office of Foreign Relations, a legal adviser in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Albania, and a delegate to the Rambouillet Conference on Kosovo. He has also served as rector, dean of the faculty of law, founder and head of the Human Rights Centre, and professor of international law and international relations at the University of Prishtina.

In his HLS talk, Hasani traced the evolution of nation-building from the Renaissance to the Napoleonic Wars, then turned to the making and unmaking of the former Yugoslavia, from the Versailles Peace Conference in 1918 to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the ensuing conflict in Kosovo, and the new republic’s declaration of independence in February 2008. He focused next on the U.N. General Assembly’s request, at the behest of the government of Serbia, for an advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice on the legality of the declaration under international law.

Read more on the Harvard Law School website.