Albania Supreme Court
Albanian President Bamir Topi’s recent appointments to the country’s high courts have been criticised as being "corrupt and incompetent" by the National Bar Association.
The association expressed its disappointment in a statement issued on Saturday, saying the president had not requested the advice of a legal expert group created to shortlist appointments.
“This process was abandoned by the president of the republic and turned into a demagogic show, which left out of the list of nominations legal personalities with high professional and moral integrity,” the association said.
“It installed a dangerous precedent by approving incompetence and corruption,” the statement added.
The consultation group, made up of the country’s top lawyers, was set up by the office of the president to shortlist nominations for vacancies in Albania’s Supreme and Constitutional Courts.
The bar association was represented in the group by its executive director, Maksim Haxhia.
The role of legal experts was particularly important due to the high number of vacancies in both the Supreme Court and Constitutional Court, which have proven politically sensitive.
The independent lawyers' group was intended to ensure credibility in the president’s nominations for judges, at a time when he was locked in a political row over with the majority, headed by Prime Minister Sali Berisha, who wanted to be consulted on the matter.
Speaking during a meeting of the experts' group on May 4, Topi promised that he would avoid nominating judges with a political affiliation to the country’s highest courts.
“In this process I will be careful not to select judges with a political profile in order to achieve the separation of judicial and political power,” Topi said.
“This selection will be based on two main pillars, professional and moral integrity,” he added.
In Albania, judges for the Supreme and Constitutional Courts are nominated by the president and later ratified by parliament.
While the ratification process does not envisage consultations with the ruling majority or the opposition, the president has been under pressure in the past to hold such talks.
Several nominations by Topi for the high courts have been rejected in recent month by the ruling majority on political grounds.
Specifically, the rejection by the ruling majority in parliament of several recent appointments to the Constitutional Court, on the grounds that they had served under the former communist dictator, Enver Hoxha, has created a political storm.
A lustration law, which aimed to bar judges from office based on the same broad criteria, had earlier been found to be unconstitutional.
Many local and international observers accused the majority of applying a law that was no longer on the statute books.
Last week the president nominated three new candidates for Albania’s Supreme Court.
However, before being vetted in parliament, their nominations came under fire from the judiciary’s ranks.
The bar association described the selection procedure as a “process that is not legal or convincing but rather reflective of narrow clique interests”.
“We can’t accept that the high representatives of constitutional institutions, mandated and directly responsible for the judicial system’s activity, act against it interests,” the association underlined.
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