Albania with a new civil register

TIRANA, Feb 24 – Authorities celebrated Tuesday the launch of the National Civil Register at a ceremony attended by Interior Minister Bujar Nishani, OSCE Ambassador Robert Bosch and other senior officials, including Austrian ambassador Klaus Derkowitsch and Austria’s head of the civil register Oswald Kessler.
Austria assisted Albania in the compilation of the new register.
Albania has been lacking such a register, that also serves for elections with its voters’ list, one of the post-communist country’s main shortcomings.
The new electronic register has included all the citizens in a digital register, unlike previous times when they used big books to keep their data.
Authorities also said the new register is clean of duplications. That directly affects results of the elections that have always run short of being totally free and fair.
At the same time authorities said that the issuing of the new identity cards is going according to plan.
They said offices where some 3.1 million people, or 73 percent of the country’s population, go to apply have already opened.
The political opposition has strongly accused the government of not making the process in line with the promise and that the lack of the identity cards would be a tool of manipulation for the June 28 parliamentary elections.