Parliament fails to pass lustration law

TIRANA, Dec 16 – Following many hours of debate, though most of it without the presence of the opposition, the parliament decided to postpone voting for the lustration law next week.
The lustration law sought to purge public posts from persons linked to the former communist secret police.
The Democratic Party dominates the 140-seat parliament and could pass the law with a simply majority, or half-plus-one of the existing numbers of parliamentarians.
However, they decided to postpone the vote until next Monday, as they seek a larger consensus.
The draft law stated that all persons linked to the former secret police, Sigurimi, from November 1944 when Albania was liberated from the Nazi occupiers until December 1990 when political pluralism was declared, cannot remain in public posts.
The opposition Socialists and other smaller parties boycotted the voting. They made it clear that the draft offered by Prime Minister Sali Berisha’s Democrats was actually to be exploited to remove some prosecutors and judges from their posts. These legal officials were involved in the legal cases against Berisha and his family members, as well as against Foreign Minister Lulzim Basha.
They specifically mentioned the Gerdec ammunition disposal factory blast in March which killed 26 people, the trial case against Basha and also the scandal with the Bosnian businessman Damir Fazlic, directly involving Berisha’s family.
Currently, a five-member Authority of Figures’ Control has been created by the parliament to function until 2014 to check public officials from the country’s president to as low as high school masters.
Late communist dictator Enver Hoxha led his Balkan country into more than four decades of international isolation and dictatorship using the intelligence service as one of the strongest weapons of the communist regime, spying on people’s lives and buttressing the rule of those in power.
Berisha said the country needed “to transit this process to clean itself from the communist calamity.” He was very harsh and mentioned that Socialist Party leader Edi Rama’s father and uncle were former top communist leaders.
There were also small political parties of Berisha’s coalition, like the Christian Democrats, who opposed the draft law.
Spartak Ngjela, a Democrat lawmaker and also a former politically persecuted and a lawyer by profession, harshly opposed the draft saying it would easily become invalid since it could not be implemented.
The lustration law, a Latin term referring to ritual purification used in Eastern European countries to purge from public life all those who collaborated with the hated secret police of the communist era, has long been an area of political controversy in post-communist Albania with the Democrats claiming their law, introduced during the first years of the 1990s, was cancelled when the Socialists came to power in 1997.
The lustration law has always been an issue of contention between the opposing political parties.
The Socialists, who complained that the Democrats accepted neither their contribution nor that of international experts to achieve a consensual draft law, accused the Democrats of exploiting the law to remove some prosecutors and judges handling corruption cases involving the premier and cabinet ministers.
“You put it out now after two years keeping it on a shelf in order to attract the attention away from the corruptive scandals … to exert pressure on justice,” according to Socialist parliamentary group leader Valentina Leskaj.
The Socialists said they would ask the Constitutional Court to decide on the validity of the new law, if passed.
The law also came under harsh criticism from the association of prosecutors and judges. If the law would pass, it would wipe out half of Albania’s Supreme Court.
“This law completely unconstitutional because judges’ work status is clearly defined by the constitution,” said the head of the Judges Association, Majlinda Bejleri.
Experts argue that the drafting of the law is problematic because according to the Albanian constitution, to dismiss a supreme court judge, a simple majority is not enough, rather two-thirds of parliamentary votes are needed.