Albania – Justice Reform like the child born dead – Op Ed by Andi Bejtja

albania, parliament, empty, seats,
Empty seats left by opposition parties at the Albanian Parliament are expected to fill up in coming weeks.

We all saw last night in Parliament for the first time the color of the coffin of justice reform. The so called Vetting Law, considered to be like the child who would bring the spring, was born already dead. The mess is so big that only 21 people came up for 27 positions of the Vetting structures and if you truly look at them with a magnifying glass, we could end up with 3-4 people.
The whole deal was marked by so many cracks, so many contradictions, so much confusion, that for those true and impartial experts of the law, this was expected to happen.

I am not an expert in the field but I would like to draw attention to one of the Vennice Commission’s interim conclusions in 2015, which was overlooked at the time.

“The Vennice Commission notes that such radical solutions (like the vetting reassesment process) are unreasonable under normal conditions, as they create huge tensions within the justice system, destabilize the activity of the judges, increase public distrust in the judiciary, take attention of judges away from their normal duties, and as any extraordinary measures, create the risk of capture of the judiciary by the political force controlling the process.”

Apart from this professional observation, no Albanian citizen would be able to understand why US and EU Ambassadors Lu & Vlahutin talk of ‘new blood’, why the US Embassy calls on Albanian patriots to participate in the process, when the law does not recognize diplomas of Albanians who have studied abroad, who would bring true new and uninfected blood, even worse, it does not even give them enough time to convert their diplomas at the Education Ministry. I have seen many of such Albanian patriots these days dissapointed who had understood clearly that the ‘Vetting People’ would be handpicked from the bag kept under the feet of the creators of this process.

In fact, the failure of the Vetting is not the worse news for Albanians. The bad news is that the majority in parliament last night, for the first time in Albania’s history, turned the constitution into a rules of procedure book, by asking the postponing of the process and the modification of rules which were sanctioned by the constitution. The Socialist Party did it, whose leader has shows across the years he doesn have a good relationship with the law.

The LSI did it as well, whose leader used the ‘calmly and with love’ slogan to committ a constitutional crime, because of his overboard veneration for consensus and compromise. Everyone fel into the justice reform trap, the EU, US, the whole political class – apart from the Democratic Party which was lucky enough to be inside the tent of protest.

I sincerely do not see how all these actors will come out of this huge hole where they continue to stumble upon each-other’s constant breaches of the constitution. We’ve got to a point where the Vetting and justice reform process can be saved only if the whole constitution is thrown down the drains. Even if a new constitution is drafted, it will end up again in trash. It is absurd how we have got to a point where the Vetting and justice reform can be saved only if there is no constitution.

What happens is that the blame game starts: “you don’t want justice reform, I want it, you don’t want the Vetting process, I want it.

In this environment, everything else is worthless. Even conditions imposed by the opposition leader that if the PM accepts a technical government the DP will vote on the Vetting structures, are merely a political game. Even if Rama accepts, what can the DP do with the Vetting law at this time, apart from continuously breaking the constitution?

Why did all this happen?

Because the so called Justice Reform was drafted from the very start from Rama the architect with the open assistance of Ambassadors Lu and Vlahutin, as an electoral platform which would grant Rama the needed victory in the upcoming elections and would eliminate his political opponents, instead of being a proper justice reform for Albanian citizens. We all know that the reform itself would require more than 5 years to be implemented.

Who imposed such conditions of voting justice reform 9 months before elections and the Vetting law only 3 months before election day? Justice reform was the best alibi for Rama to cover criminality in politics, the ‘cannabization’ of the country and corruption – it became the only electoral platform of a slogan like ‘rebirth‘ which also died before being born.

Its creators cannot get justice reform out of the hole where they pushed it with their own hands. EU Ambassador Vlahutin cannot do it because she asked for an un-consensual vote from the very start. Neither can US Ambassador Lu who directly or indirectly called the Albanian opposition not only anti-democratic, but also deceitful.

Above all, it is purely because justice reform was used as an SP electoral platform only three months ahead of upcoming elections, that these actors find it impossible to get the opposition out of their protest tent and into parliament.

Albania, like many transition countries in the region and wider has had many such moments of crisis. But the country has never gone through such a situation where its justice reform died at the inception womb, with its territory full of cannabis, with a fallen constitution, with the opposition boycotting parliament and without credible international negotiators in Tirana, who are more concerned with covering up their own personal corruption, than find out about the true corruption in Albania.

It is the first time that my heart cries out ‘God Save Albania‘.

*Andi Bejtja is a renowned Albanian journalist, publicist and former news director at Klan TV. He now works as a freelance analyst and commentator.