The Albanian vetting model revealed unjustified assets of judges and prosecutors, but after 6 years it turns out that some institutions have remained empty due to the lack of new judges and prosecutors in Albania.
As hundreds of judges were expelled from the system, many cases remained pending and the drafters of justice reform did not anticipate who would replace them in office, the portal lapsi.al said on Friday.
To mitigate the consequences of vetting, it is planned to close 15 courts in the country, which are no longer functional. Five of them are on appeals and will be replaced by only one court in Tirana. Meanwhile, 10 courts of first instance will be closed to be reorganized according to logic, one district, one court.
“If we refer to the workload for judges this year, we can say that we have gone to an average of about 640 cases per judge, not counting the Supreme Court,” said Naureda Llagami, who heads the High Judicial Council during a meeting on the new map a few days ago. Llagami said that in some courts “we have over 3,000 cases per judge such as the Administrative Appeal or the Tirana Court of Appeals where there were 2,500 cases per judge.”
The load has been going on for years, while the peak has reached the Supreme Court, where they expect to receive over 35,000 cases. The head of this court, Sokol Sadushi, expressed concern about the recourse made by the lawyers and asked them not to take any case to the High Court.
Lawyers in the country’s major cities have opposed the new court map, saying it would remove the institution from citizens and increase the costs of the process, making it more difficult to find justice.
“The reduction of 19 courts significantly removes the citizen from the Court, because it forces the citizen from the farthest corners like Kukës, Tropoja, Korca, Shkodra, Maliqi, Pogradeci, Saranda, Gjirokastra, Vlora, Fieri, Berat, etc., to go to Tirana, where in addition to travel costs it is the problem of sheltering,” said the representative of the Bar Association in Shkodra, Anton Kosteri.
Albania has been considered a bad example for the 5 other Western Balkan countries which have not accepted the pressure of the EU and the US to apply the model of this Balkan country which is carrying out the vetting process under the scheme of reform for more than 6 years. The mandate of the vetting is overdue but parliament prolonged it under the pressure of the internationals which seem to have made an unsuccessful experiment in this country. / Argumentum.al
