Today, representatives of the Animal Rights Foundation met with Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Environment, Spatial Planning and Infrastructure, Mrs. Linda Çavdarbasha, Chief of Cabinet of the Minister, Mrs. Rineta Jashari and Mr. Gent Zeqiri, Media Advisor at MESPI.

In this meeting, with the deputy Minister, we talked about wildlife protection, and presented our findings on legal discrepancies of wildlife protection in Kosovo.

The current legislation in relation to the legal protection of wild animals leaves much to be desired, as many legal and sub-legal acts are deficient when it comes to wildlife protection, and on the other hand uncontrolled hunting remains a very worrying problem, for which so far our institutions have not taken concrete and serious actions to solve this problem.

Deputy Minister Çavdarbasha was very open for cooperation on this topic as well, since wildlife is a very important part of environmental protection, and consequently, without wildlife there can be no sustainable ecosystem.

We offered our support as an NGO to the Ministry in order to take concrete steps for the protection of wildlife, starting from filling the gaps in the current legislation. In this regard, our organization in the coming weeks will submit to MESPI a legal analysis of current legislation related to the protection of wildlife in Kosovo, and then, will propose concrete steps to improve the institutional protection of wildlife in Kosovo.

We thank the Deputy Minister Çavdarbasha and her staff who received us at the meeting, as well as for their readiness to take concrete steps for sustainable protection of fauna in Kosovo.