What Greece Means by International Law

In one week, on one tour, a Greek foreign minister used the same phrase to bless Belgrade, pressure Tirana, and deny Pristina. The phrase was “international law.” The standard applied beneath it was not the same.

Ngadhnjim Brovina

George Gerapetritis arrived in Belgrade on 12 June with a refrain. Greek foreign policy, he said more than once, is firmly anchored in international law and the principles of the United Nations Charter. He said it about Serbia’s path to Europe. He said it about Greece’s seat on the Security Council. He said it about the status of Kosovo. A compass that points in one direction is useful. This one pointed wherever the minister happened to be standing.

Begin with the itinerary, because an itinerary is a text, and this one was written in Athens. The tour opened in Belgrade and kept its warmest language there. Serbia’s accession, Gerapetritis called a geopolitical inevitability, and he said it to the Serbian president, prime minister and foreign minister before he had set foot anywhere else in the region. According to To Vima, the Greek daily, the schedule runs from Serbia on the 12th to Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro on the 19th. Albania, North Macedonia and Kosovo were left for dates to be announced later. As of this writing, the visit to Tirana still has none. That is the one capital with which Athens is presently quarreling.

None of that, taken alone, is a scandal. Say so plainly, before saying anything else. Belgrade is the densest file Greece keeps in the region: a High Cooperation Council, a memorandum signed with Marko Đurić in Athens in December 2024, an agreement the following September to lend Greek expertise to Serbia’s accession, an energy corridor designed to carry gas north toward Serbia and beyond. A minister who opens his tour where the business is thickest is following logistics, not plotting. Greece has declined to recognize Kosovo since 2008; restating that position in Belgrade is continuity, not escalation. And Greek pressure on Tirana has a history older than any resort on the Adriatic. It runs through the Greek minority in the south, the property disputes around Himara, the case of Fredi Beleri, the ethnic Greek mayor of Himara jailed in 2023, a dossier Athens has worked for years. Grant each of these its due. The order of the visits proves nothing by itself. The Kosovo line proves nothing by itself. The pressure on Albania proves nothing by itself.

What proves something is the three of them held in one hand, in one week, under one phrase. Watch what the phrase does in each place. In Belgrade, international law means inevitability: the embrace comes first, the reforms are described as acceleration, the conditions arrive softened and late. In Tirana, the same vocabulary hardens. Over the events at Zvërnec, Athens told the Albanian government that respect for minority property rights and the protection of ecological areas is, in its own words, a prerequisite for progress in the accession process. Identical lodestar, opposite gravity. To the larger neighbor, law is a door held open. To the smaller one, it is a bar raised higher.

The bar has been raised this way before. In 2023, over the Beleri case, Greece refused to sign the letter the rest of the Union was ready to send to open Albania’s negotiations, and informed Brussels that it could not agree to the next stages of Albanian accession until Tirana satisfied it on the fate of a single jailed mayor. Athens froze a neighbor’s European path over one bilateral grievance and named the reason rule of law. No condition of that kind has ever been laid on Belgrade. The Serbian record, from documented democratic backsliding to the armed attack at Banjska, is treated by the same minister not as a brake on accession but as friction to accelerate past.

And to Pristina, law is a verdict already entered. Here the phrase does its quietest and least honest work, so be exact about what the law says. In 2010 the International Court of Justice, the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, gave an advisory opinion on Kosovo. The question came from Belgrade. Serbia authored the resolution and wrote its wording, asking whether the declaration by the Provisional Institutions of Self-Government was in accordance with international law. The phrasing was built to win. It named the caretaker institutions as the authors and called the act unilateral, steering the court toward a finding that some rule had been broken. The court answered only the narrowest version of the question. It held that the authors had acted not as those institutions but as representatives of the people of Kosovo, outside the interim framework; it found the act of declaring independence violated no applicable rule of international law; and it refused to rule on whether any right to declare independence existed, a larger question it said it had not been asked. The court did not pronounce Kosovo a state, and it did not strip Serbia of anything; it answered the small thing and left the rest alone. Belgrade asked a loaded question and received the smallest possible reply. One line of that reply travels further than Athens would like: the court held that the principle of territorial integrity, the very ground on which the non-recognizers rest, governs relations between states and does not bind a population declaring independence from within. Whether Kosovo is a state, whether recognition is lawful or owed, what recognition does: none of that was before the court, and the court said as much. That silence is a limit on the ruling, not a verdict on the question. It means only that the opinion Athens leans on says nothing whatever about status, and cannot be made to. The one court that has ruled on the matter is the one Athens does not invoke, and it refused Belgrade the very answer Belgrade wrote the question to get.

Gerapetritis did not argue with any of that. He did something subtler. He called the 2008 declaration “unilateral,” a word chosen to carry the scent of illegitimacy; he placed Greece’s non-recognition under the banner of a policy guided, in his telling, by the principles of international law and the Charter; and he never mentioned the court at all. The one ruling on the question went unspoken, and the impression left behind was that law and non-recognition face the same way. Treating an unsettled question as settled, and implying that the settlement is what international law demands, is not the same as lying. It is worse in a quieter manner: it borrows the authority of a judgment it does not cite and could not invoke.

The irony is one the minister supplied himself. Greece grounds its current standing in its temporary seat on the Security Council and in fidelity to the Charter. The Charter belongs to the United Nations. So does the court whose single finding on Kosovo Athens prefers not to weigh. A foreign policy cannot name the United Nations as its compass and then discard the one reading it dislikes from the United Nations’ own bench.

This is the pattern, and naming it precisely matters more than denouncing it loudly. A principle is a rule that binds you when it costs you. A preference is a rule you reach for when it pays. Greek conduct across these three capitals tracks the density of each relationship and very little else. It is generous where the ties are thick and exacting where they are thin. It goes quiet about the friend’s record and turns instructive toward the stranger. That is not a foreign policy anchored in international law. It is a foreign policy anchored in its own friendships, wearing the vocabulary of law like a robe over a position it would hold regardless.

The reason this should trouble anyone who wants the Western Balkans inside Europe, and not merely anyone who wants Tirana or Pristina to win an argument, is simple. The accession process is supposed to be the one mechanism in this region that runs on merit rather than affinity. A candidate is meant to be measured against the acquis, not against the warmth of its capital toward Athens. When a member state converts that process into an instrument of its own bilateral preferences, blessing the friend and conditioning the stranger and presenting both as Europe, it does not advance enlargement. It teaches every candidate the lesson that the rules are negotiable and the relationships are not.

Gerapetritis brought a compass to Belgrade and called it international law. On the rest of the tour, the needle is worth watching. So far it has not pointed anywhere he did not already wish to go.

Ngadhnjim Brovina is a political scientist at the University for Business and Technology in Pristina, where his research addresses party systems, democratic consolidation, and transnational party organisation in postcommunist Europe.