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Two days after we landed in Pristina, the Assembly finally confirmed a new Kurti cabinet with a single vote to spare. We've been reading what that narrow majority, and the unresolved fight over the presidency, mean for same-sex partnerships.
Two years into civil unions, Latvia has moved further than its Baltic neighbors on paper but stopped short of marriage — a constitutional wall that's shaping the next phase of the country's LGBTQ+ rights fight.
Kosovo's constitution already promises equality, and its prime minister has backed civil unions. So why has the Civil Code that would deliver them been stuck in the Assembly for years?
At May's accession conference the EU turned a long-standing 'to-do' into a closing benchmark: no partnership recognition and gender-recognition law, no finishing Cluster 1. For Albania's LGBTQ+ community — and for us, here in Tirana — that changes the math.
Europe's youngest country has one of the region's strongest anti-discrimination laws on paper — and a decade of Pride marches to prove it. So why do a legal gender recognition procedure and civil unions still not exist?
Kosovo's capital held its tenth Pride parade under the slogan 'Equality or Revolt.' Hundreds marched and diplomats showed up, but this year a telling group stayed away: the country's own politicians.
The court struck down part of a 1939 fascist-era pension law, ruling that INPS cannot refuse a widow's pension to the surviving spouse of a same-sex couple married in another country before Italy's 2016 civil unions law took effect.
The 9th edition of Kosovo's Pride lands in a country whose government promised marriage-adjacent civil unions and then watched its own parliament refuse to deliver them. Organizers are framing 2026 as a refusal to retreat.
Albania has cleared the interim benchmarks on rule of law and fundamental rights, accelerating EU negotiations. The country still has no legal recognition of same-sex couples, and the Discrimination Commissioner's mandate expired in 2023 with no successor appointed.
Montenegro remains the only Western Balkans country to legally recognize same-sex couples. Six years after the law passed, the low number of registrations says more about safety than about demand.
Prime Minister Kurti pledged to legalize same-sex civil unions by May 2024. The deadline passed, an election came and went, and Kosovo's LGBTQ+ community is still waiting.
