The Criminal Code must change the article that created the Republic of Prosecutors

By Mero Baze

The attempt to make several legal changes to the Criminal Code, aimed at easing the climate of repression created by pre-trial detention and the prosecution’s disregard, in many cases, for fundamental human rights, is a positive development that has so far raised concern only among the prosecutors’ association. There may be other reactions later, but the first reaction matters greatly, because it shows who feels threatened by the draft law.

The premises on which the changes are based concern grim statistics on pre-trial detention in Albania, which leads Europe in the use of detention — more than two and a half times the European average, according to the Council of Europe’s SPACE report. The average length of pre-trial detention here is 253 days in the courts of general jurisdiction and 616 days in the Special Court, while the average in the European Union is around 155 days.

Even more problematic is conduct during investigations: psychological torture and blackmail in prosecutors’ offices without cameras, which end up producing frightened witnesses. A series of scandals has occurred over the seizure of electronic devices, phones or computers, equating the right to seize with the right to read everything, without court authorisation. Our prosecutors go hunting through the computers and phones they seize, looking there not for the offence under investigation but for something else, turning the investigation into a lynching process against a person they have decided in advance to convict.

All of this has created a climate of repression in the country, especially after the justice reform, when SPAK was given super-competences and superpower over the entire justice system because of a fatal article that allows it to monitor judges and prosecutors in the SPAK and GJKKO system without authorisation. That article, and the persecution that individual SPAK prosecutors inflict on their defendants — threatening and blackmailing the judges handling their cases — is one of the gravest consequences of the Justice Reform in Albania.

Albania may be the only country in the world where judges frightened by SPAK, or admirers of its superpower, go even beyond SPAK’s requests in preliminary hearings, asking for further investigations as if to show that they are either afraid of it or competing with it over who can trample most on the dignity of an accused citizen.

Therefore, when the Ministry of Justice or the Assembly argues why these changes to the Criminal Code are needed, they should rely not only on the statistics — which are almost criminal compared with Europe and the world — but on the cause of those statistics. SPAK must be stripped, sooner rather than later, of the right to wiretap its colleagues and GJKKO judges. Not because I feel sorry for those being wiretapped, but because there is now sufficient proof that SPAK and its leaders do not wiretap to investigate colleagues, but to blackmail them.

There is clear proof that SPAK, in the “Toyota Yaris” file, has GJKKO judges and prosecutors implicated and uses them under blackmail to obtain decisions that suit it. There is now public proof that SPAK holds inappropriate recordings of judges or prosecutors meeting criminal elements, but does not act against them, preferring to use them in political processes to protect the honour of prosecutors who first decide whom to convict and then look for evidence along the way.

So not only must this toy be taken out of their hands, but they must also be investigated for how, while they had it, they used it.

This whole climate of repression, this whole blurred line between the prosecution’s case and the court’s decision, comes from the fact that the Republic of Prosecutors holds all the power within the Republic of Justice and everyone else is its soldier. In truth, we gave justice full independence, but at the same time we must also give the Republic of Justice equal rights in relation to one another.

All these dreadful statistics we have stem precisely from that superpower, which it is hard to see how the reform’s drafters justified when they wrote it. But since you are putting your hand to the law, start from the problem, not from the consequences.