The Magistrates Showed Us That Albania’s Problem Is Themselves. Rama Knew It!

By Albatros Rexhaj

In Albania a citizen can wait years for a court to rule in his favor. The Administrative Court of Appeal closed 2024 with 23,862 pending cases. Behind that number are properties, jobs, pensions, administration obligations and years of life frozen in a file. The explanation is always the same: too many files, too few judges.

Then came the judges’ salaries. The lawsuit was filed on 11 September. The security measure was granted the same day. Time was found.

The citizen waits years. They waited one day. And precisely here the Parliament’s delay did a service no one had planned. Had the law been adopted on time, we might never have seen how far this system’s instinct goes when its own interests are at stake.

Erion Braçe said Parliament should have decided by 31 July, and said it as a reproach. It is not a reproach. The Constitutional Court decides only when a law dies; when Parliament convenes, Parliament decides. No one can order parliament to vote; when it delays, voters punish it, not the prosecutor. On salaries the Court said one single thing: they are set by law. The law is made by Parliament. Parliament delayed. Competence did not automatically pass to someone else, and the delay did not make the KLGJ into Parliament.

The KLGJ didn’t wait. On 26 August it raised the reference salary itself from 156,825 to 222,425 lekë, plus 14,000 for qualification. It also ordered the recalculation of the financial effect retroactive to April 2023. The government estimates these arrears at around 12 billion lekë. When the Treasury refused, the magistrates didn’t wait there either. They went to the prosecutor. They reported the Finance Minister, the secretary general and the heads of Treasury branches. Then their salary went to court, and the court decided within the day. The few judges — the reason given to us for every delay — don’t pick and choose files.

When the court delays, the official is not afraid. When the official is not afraid, the citizen looks for a connection. When the connection isn’t enough, the middleman steps in. Then the lek enters — not only to buy the verdict, but also to get in line. Thus the court’s delay becomes how the state functions. The court is the institution that should fix all the others. The politician, the clerk, the owner. When it doesn’t work, all the others learn they can not work either. That’s why, when I look for the reason public trust in Albania’s institutions is so low, I put the magistracy first. Politics comes after it. I know it’s become fashionable now: Rama to jail, Berisha to jail, accountability demanded only from politics, and whoever demands it is called independent. But this story takes us to the genesis of this country’s problems: the court and the prosecutor who drag things out, who make the citizen seek connections and middlemen, and who now also want film-like salaries. The bad politician should fear the court, and today he does. Albania’s problem is that the judge who doesn’t judge has never feared anyone.

They live off this system. Others pay its cost, with years of their lives. And now they demand to be paid for it more than everyone else — more than the President of the Republic. Hence the magnifying glass.

Rama knew this — and I don’t mean only about the salaries. For years politics sat in the defendant’s dock and the magistracy in the chair that delivers the verdict: politicians had to be investigated and arrested, justice had to be funded and left alone. A comfortable division, until the day the magistrates had to show how they behave when the interest is their own. I can’t prove what Rama was thinking, but I can see what he had in front of him. On 30 July, a day before the deadline expired, two Socialist MPs, Aulona Bylykbashi and Admir Kadeli, had a solution on the table: the coefficient from 0.36 to 0.38. Parliament didn’t vote it. Then everything you read above happened, and Rama came out with the figures. With the tables, with the Bank of Albania’s exchange rate of 11 September, with the hearing date. Someone caught by surprise doesn’t have all that ready within a weekend. Rama had prepared to fight this battle. The magistrates simply handed him the material.

On 10 September the General Meeting of Judges warned that the conflict could be taken to the European Commission and to foreign diplomatic representations. It also warned of limiting courts’ work to urgent matters only. A power of the Republic, in conflict with the Republic’s other two powers, lists embassies as its address. When politics opposes their interest, they seek the arbiter outside the Albanian state. “The Constitution is not negotiated,” they said. I agree. Nor is it negotiated in embassies.

The Prime Minister is right about the treasury. He is right about the drawers too. And yes, I would push the law one more session, so Parliament reminds everyone that it is Parliament, and that neither Councils, nor the prosecutor, nor embassies set its date. Then let it vote — and let it vote without apologizing. These weeks the magistracy didn’t change; it was only exposed. Without that delay we would never have seen so clearly what happens when the people who keep us in line for once have to wait themselves.