International Day to End Impunity 2025: ECPMF’s Silence Is the Crime

On the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists, 2/11, I speak of ECPMF, because its silence is impunity, polished and European.

I remember the silence more than the vandalism.

On 11 October 2025, after unknown men shattered the windows of my family’s empty house in Kosovo and desecrated the memorial car we kept for my late father, I did what journalists are trained to do: I documented it, issued a statement¹, and asked the institutions that claim to defend press freedom to stand where they say they stand. It was a textbook case. Nothing was stolen. The target was not property, it was reporting. The attack followed months of threats from the same circles I had been exposing for laundering Belgrade’s and the oligarchs’ interests through media. It followed a year of articles that made a lot of comfortable people uncomfortable. It was, in every meaningful way, the kind of incident European organisations love to condemn when it happens far enough away.

The National Union of Journalists spoke². The International Federation of Journalists spoke³. CPJ welcomed swift police action⁴. The European Centre for Press and Media Freedom, the organisation that lectures governments from Lisbon to Tbilisi on their sacred duty to protect journalists, was informed on 13 October.

And then nothing.

I have seen a lot in the last two decades, enough to know that bureaucracies don’t always move at the speed of outrage. But when an institution that calls itself “the European Centre” for the very freedom now under attack in a NATO-protected, EU-courting, Russia-targeted corner of the Balkans decides that the safer option is to keep its head down, that moment exposes everything. It tells you what is performance and what is principle. It tells you who is allowed to be a victim and who is not. It tells you that the moral authority that looks so polished on their website⁵ does not always survive contact with a case that is politically inconvenient to their friends.

That is the centre of this dispatch.

I’ve come to realise that the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom speaks as if it runs the conscience of the continent, but behaves as if conscience is something it can’t afford when the scrutiny turns inward.

This is not an abstract critique. I am not writing about “NGO culture” in the abstract. I am writing about an organisation whose staff and partners have intervened, loudly and repeatedly, in Kosovo’s internal media debates, defending outlets that registered in Serbia while broadcasting in Kosovo, amplifying actors with overt political alignments, and publishing letters that presented Prishtina’s attempts to defend its information space as authoritarianism, and yet, when one of the journalists who challenged that narrative was targeted, they went quiet.

Silence, in this case, is not neutrality. It is a decision.

To understand the weight of that decision, you have to walk back through the last three years, through the reporting I published in January, July, August and again in October 2025, through the documents we sent to Leipzig, through the questions they chose not to answer.

In January 2025 I wrote a piece that many of them read, some of them admitted it quietly, called “The ECPMF’s Selective Outrage: Protecting Propaganda, Not Press Freedom.”⁶

It dissected their joint letter about Kosovo’s governing party boycotting certain media outlets. The letter was presented, as such letters always are, as a defence of pluralism. But Kosovo is not Sweden. You cannot defend pluralism while ignoring the very real use of media as an instrument of Serbian, Kremlin-aligned destabilisation. You cannot elevate Klan Kosova’s⁷ business registration games as if they were a noble press freedom cause and gloss over the fact that registering in “Peć, Serbia” was an act of constitutional contempt in a country still fighting for recognition. You cannot claim the right, as the UK and EU have done, to ban Kremlin propaganda and then deny Kosovo the same right. Yet the ECPMF’s intervention did just that. It treated Prishtina’s insistence on legal compliance as censorship, because it suited its local interlocutors.

At the heart of that strange, incurious stance stood one person, their media law officer, later introduced in the region as their “senior legal adviser”, Flutura Kusari. I said then, and repeat now, that her track record in Kosovo raised serious questions about partiality. She had positioned herself, consistently, as a critic of the current government precisely at moments when the government was pushing back against Serbia’s networks and their local helpers. She endorsed outlets that repeated Belgrade’s talking points. She mocked foreign policy lobbying meant to strengthen Kosovo’s recognition. She amplified smear campaigns against investigative work that exposed the U.S. diplomat Gabriel Escobar’s entanglements. All of this was known. All of this was documented. And yet, inside ECPMF, none of it triggered the defensive antibodies that are supposed to exist in organisations that preach accountability. Instead, she became the gatekeeper for what ECPMF thought Kosovo was.

Then, in July 2025, something happened that broke the spell for anyone still willing to pretend this was just about interpretation.

Kusari, a woman who built a European platform denouncing Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, filed a criminal complaint in Prishtina against a citizen, Mentor Llugaliu, because he criticised her online and nicknamed her “Mickoja”.

The Basic Prosecution looked at it and said: there is no crime here. No threat. No contact. No stalking. One addressee, one public figure, multiple public posts, ugly perhaps, but not criminal. The case, on the merits, was dead.

What did Kusari do?

She did not accept the legal reality and walk away.

She orchestrated an international chorus⁸. IFEX, IPI, Index on Censorship, and yes, her own ECPMF, published statements of solidarity with her as if she had been a victim of gendered harassment, instead of what she was in that instance, a powerful insider trying to use the criminal code to punish criticism. Those statements were not spontaneous. They were engineered by her and submitted to the prosecution in parallel with her complaint. I saw the timing. I saw the posts. I saw the way an individual, acting in her own interest, weaponised the prestige of international organisations in order to bend a domestic legal process.

That should have been the moment ECPMF paused and asked itself: are we in the business of defending journalism, or of laundering the private battles of our staff?

Instead, when the case was rejected a second time on appeal, Kusari doubled down, and did something I find more dangerous than the first move. She named the prosecutors publicly, by name, and accused them of failure. Her allies in local NGOs followed, publishing near-identical statements demanding the Kosovo Prosecutorial Council review those prosecutors’ performance. This was not, as some of her defenders tried to spin it, a brave woman seeking justice. It was an international officer, backed by EU money and German honours, using her platform to intimidate a small country’s judiciary.

Again: ECPMF could have stepped in. It could have said, in the language it uses on others, that public shaming of prosecutors in a fragile democracy is incompatible with press freedom values. It could have reminded its staff that you cannot both fight SLAPPs and file one.

It could have said: we cannot endorse private legal campaigns by our own advisers and still expect to be taken seriously when we preach to governments.

It said nothing.

So, in August 2025, we at Gunpowder Chronicles did what they refused to do. We published the full correspondence⁹. We showed the screenshots of the coordinated endorsements. We sent detailed, factual questions to the ECPMF, to IPI, to Columbia Global Freedom of Expression, to the German Embassy in Prishtina, and to Kusari herself.

We asked very simple things:

• did you know both prosecutorial instances had rejected the complaint?

• Did you consider the public naming of prosecutors acceptable?

• Did you conduct due diligence on her silence in real SLAPP cases, including the Devolli-linked ones?

• How do you reconcile this with the European Charter on Freedom of the Press, the very document on which the ECPMF claims to rest?

They did not answer.

The German Embassy wrote back to say, politely, that its assessment “differs” from ours. It did not address the substance. It did not address the misuse of its endorsement in a domestic legal dispute. It did not address whether a German state honour could be weaponised against Kosovo’s own justice system.

When powerful organisations refuse to explain, they are not just being lazy. They are protecting an arrangement.

Here is the double standard, laid out as cleanly as I can manage.

When ECPMF and its partners criticise small states Kosovo, Georgia and Albania, they speak the language of obligation. They demand transparency. They list articles and covenants. They insist that independence of the judiciary is non-negotiable. They tell governments that media registered in hostile jurisdictions must still be tolerated because “pluralism.” They tell ruling parties not to boycott outlets that insult them. They invoke the Charter, the UN Plan, the EU acquis.

When accountability knocks on their own door, when someone asks them to explain why their senior adviser acted like a political operator, why they backed her without checking facts, why they stayed silent when a journalist who had scrutinised them was attacked, they delay, they reframe, or they redefine.

They never lie outright.

They just make truth wait until everyone has gone home.

This is not clumsiness. It is design.

ECPMF is, first and foremost, a project of European respectability. It was born in 2015 out of a beautiful idea, a European watchdog to protect the 2009 Charter on Freedom of the Press, and it has been bankrolled, largely, by the European Commission, backed by German municipal foundations, blessed by high officials in Brussels. Its funding depends on remaining a safe, attractive, non-controversial partner for European institutions. Its public authority depends on being perceived as neutral and principled. Its regional reach depends on local fixers and advisers who “know the scene”, which is how you end up trusting people whose politics you don’t really understand.

Inside such an organisation, two instincts grow very strong.

The first is brand protection. You do not want to admit, publicly, that someone carrying your colours has abused her platform. Because if you admit it in one case, people will start looking at others. And if they start looking at others, they might notice patterns, allegiances to oligarchic media in Kosovo, indifference to attacks on critics in Bosnia, blind spots where EU interests are involved.

The second is patronage protection. If your adviser is tied to one faction in a small country’s media war, if she sits in their studios, drinks in their cafeterias, takes photos with their owners, amplifies their talking points, then calling her out means picking a fight not only with her, but with that whole faction. That can make fieldwork harder. It can cost access. It can damage partnerships. It can, in the worst case, draw the annoyance of the embassy that likes her.

So the organisation does what so many of the actors it monitors do: it chooses institutional self-preservation over its stated principles. It is not evil. It is afraid. But fear, repeated often enough, becomes the mission.

The result is the same corrosive logic we see in captured press associations in the Balkans, just written in better English and set in Leipzig.

I have heard, especially from colleagues in Western Europe, a version of this defence: “Yes, but you and the ECPMF have had disagreements, maybe they didn’t want to be seen as taking sides.” That sounds sensible if you don’t know the chronology. In the last fifteen months I published investigations about the Association of Journalists of Kosovo protecting partisan outlets while ignoring actual threats. I analysed how donor money and award circuits produced a cartelised press that polices critics and flatters friends. I showed how the ECPMF’s own Kosovo-facing people sided, over and over, with media aligned with the Devolli business empire and with political clans nostalgic for the pre-VV years. I named names. I published screenshots. I did not do it in private. I did it in public.

When my house was vandalised, that history did not become irrelevant.

It became the test.

A genuine press freedom organisation would have said: we have been criticised by this journalist and we have defended people he has criticised, but intimidation is not a tool we accept, we condemn this attack, full stop.

That is what NUJ did. That is what IFJ did. That is what CPJ did. They separated critique from threat. They chose principle.

ECPMF did not, because to do so would have drawn a line that led straight back to their own double standard in Kosovo.

What makes this more bitter is that ECPMF is, in its own origin story, a monument to people telling Europe that press freedom must be a precondition for accession. In 2009, editors took the Charter to Brussels and Luxembourg to say: this must be the rule. In 2015, parliamentarians and German funders set up the Centre to enforce that rule. The rhetoric was, and still is, ruthless when addressed to candidate countries, adopt the Charter, protect journalists, investigate all attacks, show that you are Europe.

But when one of their own advisers is accused, with evidence, of using that European prestige to intimidate Kosovo’s prosecutors, they shrug. When the same organisation is asked to condemn the vandalism of a journalist who has been exposing Kremlin-aligned Serbian operations, at a time when Europe spends billions countering Russian disinformation, they go quiet.

You can lecture the Balkans.

You just cannot be lectured by the Balkans. Can you?

I am not the only one who noticed. A Kosovar source, repeatedly targeted by the same media clusters ECPMF has cosied up to, put it to me in one sentence that I have not been able to improve: “When they wanted to discipline us, they said rules were sacred. When we asked for the same rules, they said it wasn’t the right time.”

That is the sound hypocrisy makes when it finally hits the ground.

So what sits behind their choices?

Start with funding. If most of your money comes from the European Commission and German public sources, you live with a constant awareness of diplomatic weather. Berlin decorates your adviser with the Federal Order of Merit. Berlin’s embassy in Prishtina publicly praises her. She then weaponises that praise. Are you, as a Leipzig-based NGO, going to publicly contradict both the German state and your own staff? Not unless you have a board made of granite. They don’t.

Add structure. ECPMF sits inside networks, MFRR, IJ4EU, wider European advocacy coalitions, in which Kusari herself is a node. To call her out is to create friction across the network. Friction is bad for joint projects. Joint projects are how you show Brussels you are delivering. Delivery is how you get the next grant.

Add politics. Kosovo is not a space most Western NGOs study in depth. They take their cues from trusted intermediaries. When those intermediaries turn out to be politically invested, the NGO is slow to update. Admitting you were played is hard. Admitting you helped launder propaganda under the banner of press freedom is harder.

Add fear. Every organisation that spends its time criticising governments dreads the moment someone throws the mirror back. The easiest way to avoid that moment is not to engage.

In the end, it looks like this: the institution that exists to ensure crimes against journalists don’t go unanswered declined to answer when a journalist asked them to do, for once, at home what they claim to do abroad.

There is an irony here I cannot ignore. Today is the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists, a day born out of real blood, real murders, real disappeared reporters. Every year, organisations like ECPMF issue statements calling on states to investigate, prosecute, and end the culture of silence. They tell governments that silence signals tolerance. That failure to condemn encourages repetition. That no attack is too small to address. That even vandalism is part of a chain that leads, in some countries, to assassination.

They are right.

They just didn’t apply it to a case that implicated their own ecosystem.

That is why this piece is not just an airing of grievance. It is a pointer to a crack in Europe’s press freedom architecture.

Because if an organisation can be swayed, muted, or compromised by the politics of a staff member in a country the EU still treats as an apprentice, what will it do when a bigger state leans harder? If it will not defend a journalist who has spent fifteen months documenting how Serbian-backed propaganda networks, Devolli-linked media, and warlord-era political clans work together to discredit and threaten reporters, what faith should we place in its declarations about Ukraine, Georgia, or even Denmark’s proposed media ombudsperson?

This is where I land.

Institutions do not have to be spotless to be useful. They can make mistakes, learn, correct. But they cannot keep telling the rest of us to submit to scrutiny while refusing it themselves. They cannot discipline governments for selective outrage while practising it. They cannot roll out the Charter on Freedom of the Press like a sacrament and then duck when someone asks: does this apply to you too?

You can fool people with your mission statement for a while. You can overawe those who rely on your grants. You can bank on the laziness of international media who will quote your press releases without ever asking who you didn’t defend this week.

But not forever.

Eventually, people notice who is lecturing and who is listening.

So here is the quiet verdict.

ECPMF is at its most convincing when it punches up at states. It is at its least convincing when it would have to punch sideways, at its own network. The gap between the two is where trust leaks out. If it wants to keep the claim to moral authority it made in 2009 and 2015, it has to close that gap.

The cure is not complicated.

Stop performing virtue.

Practise it.

Issue statements because they are right, not because they are convenient. Subject your own advisers to the same standards you apply to Balkan civil servants. Tell your funders, when necessary, that principle costs. Admit publicly when you have backed the wrong horse. And when a journalist is attacked, even a journalist who has spent months exposing your blind spots, do the one thing you were founded to do.

Stand up.

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1. PRESS RELEASE: Journalist Vudi Xhymshiti Condemns Vandalism of Family Home in Kosovo

Investigative journalist Vudi Xhymshiti condemns the vandalism of his family home in Kosovo, calling it a criminal intimidation linked to his exposés on Serbian espionage networks. — The GPC Official Dispatches.

2. Family home of investigative journalist vandalised — NUJ.

British National Union of Journalists NUJ — X Post.

3. International federation of Journalists IFJ — X Post.

4. Comitte to Protect Journalists CPJ — X Post.

5. European Centre for Press and Media Freedom — About ECPMF.

6. The ECPMF’s Selective Outrage: Protecting Propaganda, Not Press Freedom

ECPMF’s selective advocacy exposes its complicity in shielding disinformation, empowering propaganda mouthpieces that destabilise Kosovo while masquerading as champions of press freedom. — The GPC Media Watch.

7. Journalism Is Dead. Klan Kosova Pulled the Trigger.

Klan Kosova isn’t a media outlet. It’s a gilded bunker for oligarchs masquerading as journalists, waging war on truth while prostituting public trust. — The GPC Media Watch.

8. How a Press Freedom Icon Became a Political Actor

Flutura Kusari built a reputation defending press freedom. Now, she stands accused of using that same power to silence a citizen who challenged her. — The GPC I Unit.

9. The Advocate Who Intimidates: Flutura Kusari’s War on Prosecutors

By naming prosecutors and silencing critics, Flutura Kusari of ECPMF doesn’t fight for press freedom, she tramples it under ego, ambition, and the shadow of the Devolli empire. — The GPC Media Watch.