TIRANA, March 9 – Two years after their establishment, administrative courts are failing to examine business appeals in time and about three-quarters of their decisions are in favour of the public administration, a report has found. The findings are unveiled by the Albanian Investment Council, a new platform set up in 2015 with the EBRD support to intensify the dialogue between the government and the private sector, improve the business climate and promote good governance.
“Administrative courts do not possess capacities to objectively review cases within legal deadlines, taking into account the high number of cases filed in such courts and the limited number of judges,” says the report about disputes the business community has with the public administration.
A total of about 12,000 cases is the backlog in the Administrative Court of Appeals alone, pending adjudication by 7 judges. Delays result from the broad object of administrative disputes that are adjudicated in these courts, where about 50 percent of the administrative cases are not directly linked to the business, the report shows.
“These courts are not responding timely to the requests from the business and to the dynamics of the problems it faces. It is found that, for purposes of meeting the tighter adjudication deadlines, the quality of their decisions is often questionable, with 70 percent of the decisions clearly in favour of the public administration,” adds the report.
Data indicates that more than 75 percent of the total number of administrative appeals from the businesses filed to the administrative courts, pertain to taxes, customs, inspections and public procurement.
Disputes between public administration institutions and businesses bear considerable costs for both parties and, at the same time, cause uncertainties and lack of trust for further investing to local and international businesses, says the Investment Council, suggesting that a fast, efficient and fair resolution of such disputes remains indispensable for encouraging investments in the country. In many of the meetings held with businesses and in the surveys conducted by the Investment Council’s Secretariat, businesses underline that “budget institutions and the staff employed in these institutions often ignore or do not know the laws of their functioning, the rules, and take decisions that are arbitrary and incompliant with applicable laws.”
The approval of the legal framework paving the way to the Administrative Court had been a perennial request by the business community to improve access to justice enabling faster procedural actions and trials.
The law approved after a long saga in late 2012 was described as an important step in reforming the judicial system, ensuring legal review of administrative decisions by independent courts, increasing transparency and fighting corruption in the civil service. It was meant to ease the case burden of other courts and allow specialized judges to deal with administrative cases, provided that the necessary resources are allocated.
The Administrative Courts of Vlora, Shkodra, Durres, Korca and Gjirokastra have 4 judges each while the Tirana Administrative Court has 16 judges. The Appeals Administrative Court in Tirana which covers all of Albania has only seven judges. An Administrative College has been set up at the Supreme Court as the highest Administrative Court instance to complete the full legal infrastructure ensuring the independent legal review of administrative decisions.
