I stand with Petrit Malaj

By Ylli Manjani

I do not know Petrit Malaj as a person. I have no particular idea of what he is like as a minister, how well or how badly he has done his job. But on one thing I have no doubt: for his resistance to letting the State Treasury be raided at the whim of judges and prosecutors, I am with Petrit Malaj.

For two weeks Albania has been witnessing a reaction that has nothing in common with the normal functioning of a constitutional state. An entire branch of power has abandoned its constitutional role and turned into a union that makes decisions in its own interest. This is not justice. This is institutional unionism.

The State Treasury is not the safe of one branch of power. It is the institution where payments ordered by law are executed. Precisely the law. Not decisions born of the interest of those who make them. In a normal state, no one grants themselves the right to order public payments outside the legal mechanism — least of all the branch that should be the arbiter of the law. Even the famous decision No. 15 of the Constitutional Court becomes enforceable only once the law recognizes it, and not the anti-constitutional union of justice.

What is happening is unprecedented. The Court makes a decision telling the finance minister: open the Treasury and pay according to our decision. In practice, the executive is being asked to hand the keys of the state’s coffers to another branch, without a law from Parliament. This is not checks and balances. This is the theft of another body’s constitutional competence, with the aim of robbing the state treasury.

In thirty-four years of working with the law I have not seen such a situation. I may have seen wrong decisions, debatable interpretations, even abuses. But for a branch of power to use its authority to decide on its own salary and then demand the forced execution of that decision — that is an event of extraordinary proportions.

Yes, cynically the saying comes to mind: “Those who made this reform, may they enjoy its fruits.” Because the reform that promised justice is producing a justice that behaves like a corporation with privileges. But cynicism is not enough. Before it stands the duty to defend the constitutional order.

I know the formalists will come out. Those who will say that every court decision must be implemented blindly. But the question is far weightier: what happens when a branch uses its competence to brazenly decide for its own pocket? What happens when that same branch answers to no one for delays, for services not provided, for files left to drag on, for citizens who wait years for a decision?

The rule of law does not mean the rule of one branch over the others. It means that each branch stays within the boundaries set by the Constitution.

Public salaries are not set by the union. They are not set by the court for itself. They are set by law. And the Treasury does not pay according to anyone’s wishes; it pays according to the law.

Most worrying is the threat of criminal prosecution against the minister who refuses to act outside the law. Here the conflict is no longer about salaries. It is about the state itself.

Let us take this absurd logic to the end. Suppose the justice union investigates the minister. Arrests him. Convicts him. With which police would it enforce the decision? With the State Police, which is part of the executive? To which prison would it take him? Who would execute a decision made in a state of war between the branches?

This is the road to an institutional clash unprecedented in any democratic state model.

That is why I stand, without any equivocation, with Petrit Malaj’s defiant stance. Not because I defend the minister. Not because I defend the government. But because I defend a principle far greater than names: the State Treasury cannot be taken hostage by anyone, neither by politics nor by justice.

If today we accept that a branch can order payments for itself, tomorrow we will no longer have a separation of powers. We will have one branch that judges, decides, orders payment and criminally threatens anyone who does not obey.

Worse, we will have a state in financial chaos. Not even in the days of Sude did such chaos occur as the one the unionist branch of justice is suggesting.

This is not the rule of law.

This is the rule of the anti-constitutional union over the state. It is an unconstitutionality that cannot be established by a court that caused it!