Public Call for Demolition of the Church of Christ the Saviour in Pristina Constitutes Hate Speech and a Threat to Religious Freedom

Statement of the Serbian Orthodox Diocese of Raška and Prizren

Gračanica, 3 December 2025

The Serbian Orthodox Diocese of Raška and Prizren expresses its deepest concern and firm condemnation regarding the latest public statement by Kosovo Albanian lawyer Tomë Gashi, who has openly called for the demolition of the Church of Christ the Saviour in Pristina. In his public post, Mr Gashi declared that this consecrated church “must be demolished”, that it is “on someone else’s land”, and that it is an alleged product of “occupation”, adding that, in his view, it is intolerable that this building has stood for twenty six years after the war and seventeen years after the unilateral declaration of independence.

Such language is not a mere opinion about urban planning. It is a direct call for the destruction of a religious building and as such constitutes a grave form of hate speech and incitement against a specific religious community and its heritage.

The Church of Christ the Saviour in the centre of Pristina is a Serbian Orthodox cathedral church whose construction began in the 1990s and was interrupted by the armed conflict in 1999. Since that time it has become one of the most heavily targeted religious sites in Europe. Shortly after the conflict, an attempt was made to destroy it with explosives. When this failed, the church was repeatedly set on fire, vandalised, defaced with graffiti, and at times turned into a public toilet or a setting for obscene music videos. Religious services have been repeatedly prohibited or obstructed by the authorities, and the clergy and faithful have been prevented on multiple occasions from celebrating the Divine Liturgy there, despite solemn feasts and pastoral necessity.

In previous public communications, the Diocese has already underlined that, according to the Kosovo land register and cadastral records, the Church of Christ the Saviour and the land on which it stands are registered as property of the Serbian Orthodox Church. There is no final judicial decision that annuls the property rights of the Church, nor any valid ruling declaring the church an illegal construction. On the contrary, court decisions have recognised the Serbian Orthodox Church as the lawful user of the site pending the conclusion of any ongoing proceedings. In this context, the assertion that the church is “on someone else’s land” is not only misleading, it also serves to morally justify calls for demolition and thereby to legitimise the idea that a religious community may be deprived of its right to worship through the destruction of its sanctuary.

The call by Mr Gashi to demolish this church does not arise in a vacuum. In recent years, various public figures, including academics and commentators, have spoken in favour of demolishing Christ the Saviour or “converting” it into some other structure, presenting it as a “violent” or “illegitimate” building and denying its character as a place of worship. These repeated calls have been followed by, and have clearly encouraged, acts of vandalism, sacrilege and institutional obstruction. The latest statement by Mr Gashi therefore represents a further radicalisation of a long standing narrative that denies the legitimacy of Serbian Orthodox religious presence in the very centre of Pristina.

This pattern of public discourse corresponds closely to the findings of the recent monitoring report on hate speech in Kosovo’s media landscape for the period April to June 2025, prepared by the Association of Journalists of Kosovo with UN support. That report documents how ethnic and religiously charged rhetoric is regularly used in Albanian and Serbian language media to normalise exclusionary narratives, demonise communities, and present them as obstacles to the interests of the majority. It notes that while explicit calls to violence are relatively rare, emotionally charged language, historical generalisations, and accusations that target ethnic and religious identities are widespread and corrosive for democratic dialogue and social cohesion. The report explicitly highlights categories of hate speech such as “negative actions”, “exclusionary rhetoric” and “demonisation or dehumanisation”, which go beyond legitimate criticism and seek to portray a community as illegitimate or unwanted in the public space.

Mr Gashi’s demand that a consecrated church “must be demolished”, coupled with the claim that it is merely a relic of “occupation” which should never have been tolerated after “liberation”, is a textbook example of such exclusionary rhetoric. It signals that there is allegedly no place in Pristina for this visible symbol of the Serbian Orthodox community, and it implicitly encourages both institutions and the public to view the continued existence of the church as an injustice that must be “corrected” by its removal. In the sensitive post conflict context of Kosovo, where over 150 Serbian Orthodox churches and monasteries have been destroyed or damaged since 1999 and where thousands of Serbs have been expelled from their homes, such calls cannot be treated as harmless rhetoric. They contribute directly to a climate in which further attacks on religious sites become more likely and more easily justified.

From the perspective of international human rights standards, this language runs counter to fundamental guarantees of freedom of religion or belief, protection of cultural heritage, and non discrimination. The European Convention on Human Rights, the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, and the UNESCO instruments for the safeguarding of cultural heritage all require states and public authorities to protect religious sites and to refrain from any action, including tolerating incitement by influential individuals, that could lead to their destruction. Kosovo’s own legal and institutional framework, including the responsibilities of the Ombudsperson Institution, the Independent Media Commission, the Press Council of Kosovo and the Office for Good Governance, is formally designed to prevent hate speech and to ensure an environment of respect for human rights. Yet the repeated calls to demolish Christ the Saviour church, now echoed by a prominent lawyer, show how far practice still falls short of these standards.

The Diocese therefore calls on Kosovo institutions, professional bar associations, civil society organisations and the international community to react clearly and responsibly to this latest expression of hate speech. Silence in the face of such statements would be interpreted as tacit approval and would further endanger not only the Church of Christ the Saviour, but the broader principle that all religious communities in Kosovo are entitled to equal protection, respect and security. The Diocese of Raška and Prizren insists that the Church of Christ the Saviour in Pristina, as a legally registered property and consecrated place of worship of the Serbian Orthodox Church, must be protected from any attempt at demolition or confiscation, and that the religious freedom of its clergy and faithful, along with the preservation of all Serbian Orthodox heritage in Kosovo, must be effectively guaranteed in law and in practice.