Prime Minister Edi Rama described as a non-decision the 4–4 split vote of the Constitutional Court regarding the government’s request to lift the suspension of Deputy Prime Minister Belinda Balluku.
Speaking on his podcast Flasim, Rama said that the Constitutional Court’s failure to reach a decision effectively reinstated the suspension of the minister, who, according to him, is not accused of corruption. He added that the government will continue its battle over this issue.
“The last note of the day, though not in terms of importance, concerns the Constitutional Court, which failed to find the strength to prevent the Albanian government from once again being taken hostage through an unprecedented and unheard-of instrument in the democratic world: the suspension of a member of the government by a prosecutor and a judge during a preliminary hearing, before the trial has even begun.
Thus, Albania becomes for the second time in two months the first example of a global absurdity, because the Constitutional Court was drowned by a spoonful of their murky water, which Cervantes in his famous book Don Quixote of La Mancha calls the reasons of Unreason.
The fact remains that the Constitutional Court’s non-decision restores the suspension of the minister, who—let us be very clear, although clarity is a luxury, and a rare one at that, which can be sought but is hard to find amid the murkiness of 700 political and media cauldrons—is not accused of corruption, not even by the prosecutor himself who invented the suspension of a government member through a decision taken in a closed preliminary hearing for the preparation of a trial.
In any case, dismantling this 100% ‘Made in Albania’ invention of the new justice system, and of an Albanian justice system that is still immature, is a necessity—not because of the specific case at hand, but because of a non-negotiable principle of democracy—to re-guarantee the executive independence of Parliament from the judicial power.
Therefore, we will continue this battle, into which we were unwillingly dragged by the anti-democratic aberration of suspending a member of the government, and in which we are unfortunately still held back today by the Constitutional Court’s inability to take a decision—one that is very simple, because it is enough to look at any country in the world, or all the countries of the world together, and you will not find anything similar—yet a decision that is equally necessary so as not to leave Albania as the only country on the planet where, today, with this brutality re-legitimized by this non-decision, even the President of the Republic could be suspended by the first prosecutor who wakes up with such an idea in mind.
Meanwhile, I have something else to say.
To anyone who has smiled with satisfaction or stuck out their tongue after the Constitutional Court’s non-decision, who sings hosannas and rubs their hands over the new fashion of arrests without trial—which reached a new peak this week with over 30 arrest warrants issued by a prosecutor in Durrës, who in fact did not only pre-detain himself, since for a case that meets none—zero, not a single one—of the conditions set by the Council of Europe and democratic justice as necessary for arrest, he threw everyone around into the same sack—I say this: anyone who believes that the natural, collective effort for the rule of law—by all of us together, government, parliament, justice system, with all its ups and downs, achievements and missteps of the new justice—will ever produce costs for this governing majority that would revive the broken mill of the opposition is mistaken day and night, because they do not understand what the Albanian people, the ordinary citizen of Albania, understand very clearly. The fight for justice, for a democratic rule of law, for a European Albania in the European Union, has only one guarantor today: me and this governing majority,” Rama said.
