Two institutions, one pattern  

The IMC is the body responsible for regulating the broadcast media sector in Kosovo. It operates under the direct authority of the Parliament, which votes on its annual budget and appoints its seven-member board.

RTK, the public broadcaster, has an eleven-member board approved by the Assembly, while its director general is appointed by the board itself. Both institutions are formally independent. However, that independence has been increasingly tested in recent years.

The backdrop to April’s appointments is significant. In 2024, the ruling Vetëvendosje-led parliament passed amendments to the IMC law that would have expanded the board from seven to eleven members, extended individual mandates to eight years, and given parliament the power to dismiss members at will. After a fiery debate, the Constitutional Court struck down the law.

Meanwhile, RTK has faced its own crises: director general Shkumbin Ahmetxhekaj resigned in July 2024, citing seven months of political pressure, and his acting successor Zana Spahiu stepped down only weeks after her appointment following accusations that RTK had run a smear campaign against two media outlets. Amid a very unstable political moment, new members of both bodies were elected.

The IMC process

A total of 30 candidates applied for six vacant positions on the IMC board. The ad hoc committee was tasked with reviewing applications, conducting interviews, and eventually sending the selected candidates to the Assembly for voting.

The entire selection process lasted between April 17 and 20, and it covered just two working days – including a weekend. On April 17, candidate files were reviewed, and an interviewing methodology was discussed but not finalised. Discussions about the methodology were still ongoing on the morning of April 20, minutes before the first candidates arrived. That same day, 23 interviews were conducted.

MPs received candidate files with little time to review hundreds of pages before interviews. Scoring compounded the problem: candidates were evaluated only after all 23 interviews were completed and not after each one, as minimum standards require. Voting was anonymous, with no tracking; as a result, some candidates received 100 points from one MP and 0 from another.

Among those confirmed by the Assembly to the IMC board are Besnik Berisha as chair, a contested figure whose previous elevation to IMC president involved an emergency meeting called by fellow member Luljeta Aliu to amend internal rules, bypassing the ongoing mandate of the chair back at the time. Aliu herself has now also been elected as a member, despite being a known public supporter of the ruling party.

The RTK process

If the IMC process was flawed, the RTK selection was more seriously compromised. Seventy-five candidates applied for eight vacant board positions, yet only two days were allocated for interviews, with many candidates given less than 12 hours’ notice before their interview slot. MPs had only one working day to screen thousands of pages.

At key moments, cameras were switched off while MPs were discussing methodology and reviewing files. Questions were pre-compiled by the expert service, revised minutes before interviews began, and each deputy chose only three, which created room for unequal treatment. Documentation standards were applied inconsistently: some candidates with incomplete files were disqualified, others were offered even a third chance without explanation.

In the weeks following the elections, the new RTK board chose its leadership: Dardan Beqiri as chair, the sole candidate for the position, and Zana Spahiu as general director, returning to a role from which she had resigned under pressure in July 2024.

The Kosovo Assembly said that “the entire process has been open, transparent and monitored by civil society and has been conducted within the legally established deadlines.” However, this strongly contradicts what civil society organisations and media experts who monitored the process stated.

Flutura Kusari, media lawyer and senior legal advisor at the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom, identified problems that preceded the procedural failures: “The level of quality of the candidates who have applied is extremely low. (…) Professionals do not trust Vetëvendosje to carry out a fair, transparent and merit-based process”, while the Association of Journalists of Kosovo (AJK) has raised concerns about both independent bodies being heavily influenced by the ruling Vetevendosje.

A pattern of decline

The elections came just a month after an international media freedom mission visited Kosovo, warning of increased political pressure on both institutions. The mission warned that the media law passed by parliament in 2025, later struck down as unconstitutional, would have deepened political control over the IMC, and denounced the insufficient funding and sustained political pressure on RTK. Similar concerns were reflected in the EU’s latest progress report on Kosovo.

Such developments happened in a context of widespread pressure on journalists, with ruling party politicians identified as a leading source of online harassment and denigration of journalists. With the establishment of the IMC and RTK, Kosovo potentially gained functional media bodies, but the broader media environment did not improve. The way the Parliament conducted the procedure actually cast an even greater shadow over the overall media freedoms.

Although Kosovo improved its ranking on the 2026 RSF Press Freedom Index, analysts caution against reading this as a sign of genuine progress. The improvement came not because the government “withdrew all political influence from the media”,  but because the Constitutional Court struck down the IMC law that would have entrenched political control. The appointments of April 2026 suggest the underlying dynamic has not changed.

Functional but compromised 

With the current regulation governing how IMC and RTK members are elected, political parties in power will continue to treat the processes as their own and try to use the media as their tool to influence public opinion. That the institutions are now functional is, at best, a partial consolation.

The Association of Journalists of Kosovo says the first meetings of both bodies have already confirmed their fears. In a statement provided to OBCT, the AJK reported that the new RTK board reappointed Rilind Gervalla, a former Vetëvendosje member, as acting director of RTK1. The AJK described him as “a key figure in converting RTK from what it should be, a public broadcaster, into a propaganda machine for the government.”

At the IMC, the new board has already issued fines against television stations for what its chair described as “biased reporting against the government” – a pattern the AJK says signals how both bodies will operate under Vetëvendosje’s influence going forward.

Kosovo’s media bodies finally have leadership. Whether that leadership will serve the public interest or the party that shaped it remains to be seen.