Boycott blocks Veliaj’s trial, Special Court fines lawyers 50,000 lek each! Haxhia: We will not back down!

The boycott in the courts continues: lawyers are abandoning trials and, for the first time, even security-measure hearings, while journalists continue to attend proceedings as members of the public, because they are required to sign a form asking for their personal data. The latest trial to fail is the one against Erion Veliaj.

Split into two camps, with some judges refusing to apply fines and others financially penalising the lawyers, the Special Court escalated the fining measure in the Veliaj trial. All the lawyers of the 11 defendants who are boycotting the hearings at the Special Court (GJKKO) were fined 50,000 lek each, while at the previous hearing, for the same absence, they had been fined 10,000 lek each by the court.

Meanwhile, the head of the National Chamber of Advocacy appealed to the High Inspector of Justice (ILD) to start verifications into the court’s interference in the legal profession and the media, not only through the regulation, but now also by escalating the fines against them.

“We will not back down, because this is the basic principle of how journalism functions. If this is violated, then let us shut down the legal profession and leave altogether. In that system Enver Hoxha shut it down; he said: ‘I don’t want lawyers’ and that was the end of it. Today the world has been perfected with one click, you search for whatever you want. Where am I supposed to find it, go outside? I have my agenda on my phone; when we set dates, we work with agendas and we have problems,” said Maks Haxhia.

The first test of how the court will resolve the failure to find a lawyer for security measures will come in the coming hours, when Greta Pepa appears before the judicial panel — a woman arrested over call centres, who has a four-month-old baby and ended up at the police station together with her child.