During an interview with News 24 Television, the Ambassador of the European Union in Albania Luigi Soreca repeated the need for having candidate lists with integrity in the next 25 April parliamentary elections. “The decriminalization law should be fully implemented. Why? Because we are at the point of starting the negotiations and the parliament must undergo reforms in areas such as the fight against organized crime, corruption, and to so you must have high standards of integrity of the members of the parliament,” said the Ambassador. With only two days left before the deadline for submitting the list of candidates that will seat in the next parliament, the allies of Albania are waiting to see whether their repeated calls in the past weeks have been positively followed by Albanian political parties. “We look forward to seeing the list and we will certainly make our assessment,” declared Soreca.
The Ambassador talked also about the goal of holding the next intergovernmental conference between Albania and the European Union in June: “This is our objective, June is the period for the first Intergovernmental Conference. It is important that while Albania continues to do the work that is needed, even during the election campaign, in the fight against organized crime, corruption, the continuation of the contruction of the judiciary, the Member States see this ongoing commitment, and therefore will have to decide, we hope that the decision for June will be positive.”
During the interview, Soreca expressed his hope that the justice reform will not be affected by the election campaign since he believed that for Albanians the reform is “not a divisive issue.” As for the criticism made by Rama against the EU, for not providing vaccine doses for the Western Balkans, Soreca repeated his previous claims that the EU has given extraordinary assistance to Albania in that direction. “I just received confirmation, before coming here, that the first 90 million of macro-financial assistance that the European Union has promised and contracted with Albania, to help its social and economic recovery, will be provided on April 1st. The second tranche of 90 million euros will be given in the summer […] I do not want to mention earthquake relief. […] It was announced in Brussels that the first tranche of EU-sponsored Covax vaccines will arrive in Albania at the end of the month. In the coming days, we will sign a grant for 11 million euros that the European Union will make available to Albania to purchase vaccines and equipment to complete the vaccination plan, ” said Soreca. The Ambassador added also that the European Agency has begun to review the Sputnik V vaccine.
