Criminal investigation on defunct Greek-Albanian maritime border agreement sought

TIRANA, May 29 – Albanian Foreign Minister Ditmir Bushati has called on the country’s general prosecutor to open an investigation on Albanian officials who negotiated and signed a now defunct agreement with Greece over the maritime border between the two countries.
The unprecedented request would affect a series of officials, including the current head of the Albanian opposition, Lulzim Basha, who served as a foreign minister at the time and inked the signature on the final agreement. The deal between the two countries was later thrown out by the Albanian Constitutional Court. The agreement was largely viewed as unfavorable to Albania, causing a massive uproar when it became public.
The Constitutional Court had ruled that the agreement went against national interests giving away Albanian territorial waters to Greece, and Minister Bushati said the prosecutor general should investigate whether the penal code was violated.
“As far as the signatories of the agreement, I believe that the chief prosecutor has documentation … and may refer to the Criminal Code,” Bushati said, referring to Article 210 which sets punishments of of five to ten years in prison for agreements made with foreign countries to partially or fully surrender Albanian territories.
An opposition member of parliament and former foreign minister, Tritan Shehu, described the proposal as “absurd” in local media, saying Bushati was breaking local and international norms with the proposal.
He added it sends a negative diplomatic message to Greece and urged the foreign minister to be more professional in his public remarks.
Albania’s constitutional court voided the agreement in January 2010, in a unanimous decision that noted “the agreement has procedural and substantive violations of the constitution and of the 1982 UN Convention on the Sea Rights Law.”
Civic society groups had taken the matter to the court together with the Socialist Party, back then in opposition. The Socialist Party claimed that the government was handing Albanian territory to its neighbor for unclear political benefits.
The agreement, based on provisions of the International Law of the Sea, was signed by the foreign ministers of Albania and Greece, Lulzim Basha and Dora Bakoyannis, respectively.
The media accused the Democratic Party-led government of not delineating the division of the continental shelf according to the equidistant principle of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, on which the agreement was based, a charge which the government denied.