This short paper discusses the priorities of Kosovo's foreign policy for 2018. The content of the paper is largely based on the roundtable organized by the Minister of Foreign Affairs and other institutions involved where the central question was also: what should be Kosovo's foreign policy priorities for 2018?

Recently Kosovo's Foreign Minister declared that Kosovo was seeking full membership into Organization for Islamic Cooperation (OIC). The paper discusses the eventual consequences for Kosovo in case it opts to send the application for membership at the Organization for Islamic Cooperation (OIC). It follows a triangular approach to conduct the analysis: legal, economic and political.

The purpose of this report will be to assess the level of compliance of Kosovo legislation with rule of law principles and human rights norms and standards enshrined in the Statute of the Council of Europe, as a condition for CoE membership. The report will start by describing briefly the formal procedures and criteria for membership in the CoE as well as assessment of the rule of law principles and human rights norms from the CoE perspective. Then it will assess the law-making process in Kosovo and how much the Kosovo legislation actually complies with the rule of law principles and human rights standards. It will also assess the legal mechanisms established to monitor the implementation and to ensure the effective enforcement of Kosovo legislation.

This policy report makes two interrelated arguments. First, it underscores the benefits of Kosovo's accession to the CoE, highlighting that membership is in the interest of both Kosovo's citizens but also in the interest of the CoE itself. Second, this policy report provides a comparative analysis of where Kosovo stands vis-à-vis other CoE and non-CoE members in terms of fulfilling the membership criteria. The report purposefully uses quantitative data from widely used and respected academic resources in order to make the claim that Kosovo does fulfill CoE membership criteria and, moreover, that in all of the key indicators for these criteria, Kosovo performs just as well as - and sometimes even better than - many recent CoE member states.