–Flamur Hyseni, Assistant Professor of Theory of State and Law, Faculty of Law, University of Prishtina, Kosovo
Constitutional deadlines are designed to make institutions act. They limit discretion, prevent indefinite delay and, in some constitutional systems, attach serious consequences to institutional failure. But deadlines raise a more fundamental question: Can the expiry of one constitutional deadline substitute for the occurrence of the constitutional event that is required to trigger another?
A recent judgment of the Constitutional Court of Kosovo in joined cases KO256/26 and KO258/26 brings this question into sharp focus.
The Court held that the 60-day period for electing the President of Kosovo began on 8 August 2026 and expires on 6 October. Its reasoning rests on the conclusion that the Assembly should have been constituted by 7 August. Because the constitutionally prescribed period for constituting the Assembly had expired, the following day was treated as the starting point of the presidential deadline.
The difficulty is that the Assembly had not been constituted by 7 August. Nor had the procedure for electing the President begun on 8 August.
The judgment therefore raises a question the relevance of which extends beyond Kosovo: What happens when constitutional time is allowed to substitute for a constitutional event?
The claim advanced here is that constitutional deadlines may discipline institutional inaction, but they should not be treated as creating the factual and procedural event on which another constitutional consequence depends, especially where that consequence is the dissolution of a democratically elected legislature.
A Deadline Needs a Trigger
The Constitution of Kosovo establishes several mechanisms that are intended to prevent institutional deadlock.
Under Article 66(1), the constitutive session of the Assembly must be held within 30 days from the official announcement of the election results. Article 82(1)(3), meanwhile, provides for the dissolution of the Assembly if the President is not elected within 60 days “from the date of the beginning of the president’s election procedure”.
The distinction between these two provisions matters.
Article 82(1)(3) does not simply establish a period of 60 days. It identifies the event from which that period begins to run: the commencement of the presidential election procedure.
The procedure must therefore begin first. The deadline follows.
In other words, the deadline does not create the event. The event triggers the deadline.
In KO256/26 and KO258/26, however, the Court connected the expiry of the period for constituting the Assembly with the beginning of the presidential deadline. Because the 30-day period for constituting the Assembly expired on 7 August, the Court considered the presidential period to have started on 8 August.
One constitutional deadline was thus used to activate another.
This is not merely a question of calculating time. It concerns the constitutional fact from which time is calculated.
“Was Constituted” and “Should Have Been Constituted”
The tension becomes particularly visible in paragraphs 219–223 of the judgment.
In paragraph 219, the Court emphasises that the Assembly must have the 60-day period available for conducting the presidential election procedure. Paragraph 220 then addresses the position of a newly elected Assembly that has not yet been constituted. The Court states that, in such circumstances, the procedure for electing the President must begin on the day the Assembly is constituted and must be completed within 60 days from the commencement of that procedure.
This establishes a clear sequence:
constitution of the Assembly → commencement of the presidential procedure → 60-day period.
Yet the following paragraphs alter that sequence.
In paragraph 221, the Court considers that, because the 30-day period for constituting the Assembly had expired on 7 August, the constitutional deadlines connected to the election of the President and the Government began to run from the following day.
Paragraph 223 makes the tension even more apparent. The Court again states that the presidential election procedure must begin on the day the Assembly is constituted. But it then concludes that, because the Assembly should have been constituted by 7 August, the 60-day period began on 8 August.
The difference between the two propositions is fundamental.
One begins the period when the Assembly is constituted.
The other begins it when the Assembly should have been constituted.
The first describes a constitutional event. The second describes the expiry of a deadline for producing that event.
They are not equivalent.
An obligation to perform an act by a certain date does not mean that the act legally occurred when that date passed. Failure to fulfil a constitutional obligation may certainly produce constitutional consequences. But those consequences must themselves have a constitutional basis.
Otherwise, the expiry of a deadline does something more than discipline institutional conduct: it creates a constitutional fact that never occurred.
Procedure, Failure and Dissolution
The problem becomes clearer when Article 82 is read together with Article 86 of the Constitution.
Article 86 regulates the presidential election procedure. It provides for nominations and successive rounds of voting. If no candidate obtains the required majority in the first two ballots, a third ballot takes place between the two candidates who received the highest number of votes in the second ballot. If neither candidate is elected in the third ballot, Article 86(6) provides for dissolution of the Assembly and new parliamentary elections.
The constitutional design therefore connects dissolution not merely with time, but also with procedure.
There must be an attempt to elect.
There must be voting.
There must be failure.
This distinction also appears in the Court’s earlier case law. In KO72/20, when discussing Article 82, the Court described the relevant ground for dissolution in terms of the Assembly’s inability to fulfil its constitutional obligation to elect the President within the prescribed period.
That distinction is important.
If constitutionally required ballots take place and no President is elected, there is a failure of the election procedure.
If the procedure never begins, there is institutional inaction.
Failure and inaction are not the same thing.
This does not mean that inaction must be constitutionally irrelevant. Constitutions may—and often do—attach consequences to institutional inactivity. The point is narrower: the consequence must follow from the constitutional rule governing that inactivity. Inaction should not automatically be transformed into the failure of a procedure that never occurred.
The Anti-Deadlock Argument
The Court’s concern is understandable.
Constitutional institutions cannot be allowed to avoid mandatory deadlines simply by refusing to act. If the commencement of every subsequent constitutional period depended entirely on the completion of the previous institutional act, political actors could potentially suspend the constitutional sequence indefinitely.
The judgment responds to this risk by treating the expiry of the mandatory period for constituting the Assembly as triggering the deadlines that follow.
As a matter of institutional functionality, this approach has an evident attraction: constitutional time must continue to move.
But the anti-deadlock objective does not resolve the textual problem.
Article 82(1)(3) could have provided that the presidential deadline begins upon the constitution of the Assembly or upon the expiry of the period within which the Assembly must be constituted. It does not.
Instead, the Constitution identifies a different trigger: the beginning of the presidential election procedure.
Preventing institutional blockage is an important constitutional objective. Yet interpretation aimed at preventing blockage still operates within the constitutional text. Functional necessity cannot silently replace one triggering event with another.
The question is therefore not whether constitutional deadlines should be effective. They should.
The question is which event the Constitution makes legally relevant for starting them.
When Inaction Produces Dissolution
The consequences of this distinction are significant.
The Court concluded that the 60-day presidential period began on 8 August and ends on 6 October 2026. According to the judgment, failure to elect the President within that period results in dissolution of the Assembly ex constitutione under Article 82(1)(3).
The resulting sequence can therefore be expressed simply:
The Assembly should have been constituted.
It was not.
The deadline for constituting it expired.
Another constitutional deadline nevertheless began.
That second deadline may ultimately lead to dissolution.
This creates a structural difficulty.
If institutional inaction can generate the same constitutional consequence as the failure of a constitutionally prescribed procedure, inaction itself can become capable of producing dissolution.
No assumption about the motives of political actors is necessary to identify this problem. It arises from the constitutional rule produced by the interpretation itself.
And this is where the Kosovo judgment becomes relevant beyond Kosovo.
Constitutional deadlines are often introduced precisely to prevent political actors from blocking institutional processes. But where the expiry of one deadline is treated as a substitute for the factual occurrence of the event required to trigger another, the distinction between deadline, event, procedure and consequence begins to disappear.
That distinction is essential to the rule of law.
Constitutional Time Cannot Create Constitutional Facts
Deadlines are indispensable to constitutional government. Without them, institutional obligations may become open-ended and political stalemate may become permanent.
But deadlines perform a particular function: they determine the period within which something must happen.
They do not ordinarily establish that the required event has happened.
This distinction becomes especially important where the consequence is dissolution of a democratically elected legislature.
If a constitution requires the commencement of a procedure, it should be possible to identify when that procedure commenced.
If it requires voting, the vote should take place.
If it connects dissolution with failure to elect, there must be a constitutionally identifiable failure to elect.
Time alone cannot supply those facts.
The central question raised by KO256/26 and KO258/26 is therefore not simply whether Kosovo’s presidential deadline ends on 6 October.
A more fundamental question comes first:
What happened on 8 August that constituted the beginning of the presidential election procedure?
If the answer is only that another constitutional deadline expired the previous day, then constitutional time is no longer merely measuring a procedure. It is being used to create its starting event.
The distinction may appear technical, but its implications are broader. Constitutional government depends not only on institutions respecting deadlines but also on maintaining the legal sequence between facts, procedures and consequences.
A constitution may attach consequences to an event. It may attach consequences to failure. It may even attach consequences directly to inaction.
But interpretation should not treat these categories as interchangeable.
The event that triggers the deadline must occur first. Only then does the constitutional clock start running. Not the other way around.
Suggested citation: Flamur Hyseni, Can Time Replace a Constitutional Event? Kosovo’s Constitutional Court and the Problem of Constitutional Deadlines, Int’l J. Const. L. Blog, Oct. 31, 2026, at: http://www.iconnectblog.com/can-time-replace-a-constitutional-event-kosovos-constitutional-court-and-the-problem-of-constitutional-deadlines/