Who Takes the Albanian Justice Reform to the Strasbourg Court
An interview with Theo Alexandridis
According to the recently published Albania Report 2024 of the European Commission, it appears that finally the end is in sight for the vetting process of the Albanian judiciary, at least in first instance, which started concretely with the establishment of the vetting bodies in 2017. As of October 2024, 794 out of 805 magistrates have been vetted by the Independent Qualification Commission (KPK). Nevertheless, many appeals are still pending at the Special Appeals Chamber (KPA) of the Constitutional Court and numerous magistrates who were dismissed by the vetting bodies have further appealed their cases at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Strasbourg. Those cases filed at the ECtHR in 2019 and 2020 have in the meantime received a verdict, including the cases Antoneta Sevdari v. Albania and Besnik Cani v. Albania, both concerning the KPA’s dismissal of a former member of the High Prosecutorial Council (KLP).
Theo Alexandridis is a partner at human rights NGO Res Publica and lawyer who has both filed numerous amicus curiae briefs1 at the ECtHR. Together with a handful of highly active colleages from Albania, UK, and Italy, he has been involved in several exceptionally well-argued applications at the Court, trying to both get justice for their clients and ensure the proper and human rights-compliant application of the vetting framework. I sat down with Theo to talk about the current state of the Justice Reform and the executive capture of the judiciary.
Could you tell us how you became engaged with the Justice Reform?
I lived in Albania from 2010 to 2016 and now that I am back in Greece I still visit a couple of times per year. My engagement with the Justice Reform was purely accidental. My main interest was that the judiciary would be able to continue to function as independently as possible, so in the beginning I thought the Justice Reform was of no interest to myself or the NGO with which I work, Res Publica. But then I started getting very disturbing, alarming signals that the reform might actually undermine the independence of the judiciary.
Of course, we should acknowledge that there were issues with the independence of the judiciary, but the Justice Reform has failed to address precisely this problem: the independence of the judiciary from the executive. The focus has rather been on corruption within the judiciary. While that was and certainly remains an issue – I have even heard reports of this being an issue with the vetting bodies – my concern was and continues to be that the government might use the Justice Reform as a pretext to solidify its grasp on the judiciary.
So with Res Publica we started preparing amicus curiae briefs, submitting them for most of the vetting cases that came before the ECtHR. As a result, I came in touch with several judges and prosecutors, and I started working on more specific cases as a lawyer, arguing them in front of the Court. That means I have of course a certain slanted opinion with regard to the vetting process, but I believe that my opinion is grounded in facts and arguments.
From your various amicus curiae briefs and memos it is clear that a substantial part of your argument revolves around the way in which the vetting bodies were elected. Could you expand on that?
If I were to sum up my biggest concerns about the election of the vetting bodies, first and foremost would be that Parliament had an unfettered discretion when it came to appointing them.
There was a first call for candidacies. The incoming applications were initially vetted by the Ombudsperson and the International Monitoring Operation (ONM) and two lists were created: List A and List B. List A concerned those who met the statutory eligibility criteria to be appointed to one of the three vetting bodies, and List B concerned those who did not. However, the number of applicants on List A turned out not to be high enough, in part because of the numerous mistakes made by the candidates in putting together their files – an indication of the scarcity of well qualified legal professionals in Albania. So they gave them a second chance, which for any regular professional application would be unheard of.
So there was then a second call for candidacies. A lot of candidates who had initially been on List B because they had not submitted all necessary documents were placed on List A. Timeframes were all very short. This meant that the Ombudsperson and ONM had very little time at their disposal to do a fully-fledged screening and vetting of the candidates. So with regard several criteria, such as the absence of any disciplinary proceedings during their life, the Ombudsperson and ONM agreed that the candidates would self-declare that they met that criterion. There was no special form for that, which is again evidence of the lack of time, and this was later admitted by both the Ombudsman and the ONM.2
The question that arises is that if they didn’t have enough time, why didn’t they ask for an extension? You are spearheading, so you claim, a monumental initiative undertaken in Albania to cleanse its judiciary from corrupt judges and prosecutors. I don’t think the vetting would have been undermined by the Ombudsperson or ONM asking for an extension of, let’s say, one month. But I suppose that the political circumstances didn’t allow for that, because everything was subordinated to the needs of the timeframe set by the Albanian government and its international backers.
After the second call for candidacies there continued to be some candidates on List B, such as Rezarta Gaba Schuetz. But then Parliament’s unfettered discretion to move applicants from List A to List B kicked in, and they decided to move her from List B, which meant she was unqualified to be appointed, to List A, which meant she qualified. You already did a second round of applications to increase the number of qualified candidates, so there should have been no particular reason to move Schuetz from List B to List A and then even appoint her to the KPA. Surely there would have been more qualified people already on List A you could choose!
From a legal perspective, it is aready problematic that Parliament had this discretion, especially since you want to untether political influence from the judiciary. This is not an indictment of Schuetz, who did nothing wrong in this process, but of the procedure followed by Parliament where it had unfettered discretion.
Then there were some rounds of interviews before Parliament. The questions were largely inane, such as “Do you have any links to politics?” “Have you done anything illegal?” I mean, what do you expect people to say? On average, the interview didn’t last more than 4–5 minutes. You would expect Parliament and the international community to have been more professional about this; you cannot interview someone who will be in the position to vet judges and final disciplinary jurisdiction over every other judge in Albania for just for five minutes!
Let’s also not forget that the agreement to appoint the members of the vetting bodies was explicitly set out as one of the conditions of the McAllister+ agreement. So you have these policitians horsetrading, and the current sad state of affairs, to be perfectly clear, is the responsibility of both political parties and also, of course, the international community, which brokered this agreement.
What should be added is that the Venice Commission in one of its opinions found that it is well known that Members of Parliament have links to organized crime. So we have a Parliament, with members with links to organized crime, having unfettered discretion to appoint those people who will vet the judges that afterward, hopefully, will go after politicians with links to organized crime. Understating it, there may be a slight concern here about conflict of interest.
Once the vetting bodies KPK and KPA were elected, they started the vetting process, starting at the high judiciary institutions. Several of those who were dismissed took their case to the ECtHR in Strasbourg, basing their case in some instances on precisely the questionable election process. Two cases have received a verdict recently, Antoneta Sevdari v. Albania and Besnik Cani v. Albania. What is the status of the implementation of these verdicts?
When you go to the ECtHR and win, this is not the end of the judgment. There will be some compensation paid to you by the state, decided by the ECtHR, but then the judgment is assigned to the Committee of Ministers, consisting of all the ministers of justice or their deputies of Council of Europe member states. Its role is to review which measures the states are taking in order to prevent similar violations in the future, because the ECtHR doesn’t want to deal with repetitive cases. If there are repetitive cases, and Albania is well-known in this respect, it means that there is a structural deficiency in addressing those issues.
I will start with Sevdari, because this case is easier. It concerned the important issue of assessing the lawfulness of property for which there is no evidence that the relevant taxes have been paid. This issue has come up in many vetting cases, and will appear in many new cases before the ECtHR. What happened in the Sevdari case was that the Court said that not every amount of money, whose licit origin cannot be conclusively proved, should serve as a ground for dismissing an assessee. This is set out in art. 61(1) of the Vetting Law.3 The drafters of the Justice Reform were – rightfully so, in my humble opinion – aware of Albania’s history, namely that many people may live in houses that have not been legalized, and that this has been tolerated for years by the authorities. Furthermore, many families, including those of prosecutors and judges, have had members working in Greece and other countries, sending back remittances while working without papers, or sometimes under conditions of human trafficking.
In the Sevdari case, the Committee of Ministers was satisfied that the measures undertaken by the Albanian government, namely the payment of compensation. This should not be taken for granted, because in some cases, the Albanian government staunchly refuses to pay the compensation awarded to applicants by the Court. A case in point is Sharxhi and Others v. Albania, with a compensation to the amount of 13 million euro. The problem from a legal perspective here is that you have a prime minister, against the background of the Justice Reform, saying that he is basically not willing to respect a final judgment of the European Court of Human Rights. It would already be very problematic if he had said that he wouldn’t implement a verdict of a lower, first instance court in Albania – that’s why we have the separation of powers – but it does take a certain kind of gall to say that you won’t execute an ECtHR judgment.
The other measure taken by the Albanian government was that the Sevdari judgment was translated to Albanian and circulated among the vetting bodies, the idea being that KPK and KPA members would read it and inform their decision-making processes on the basis of the Court’s findings. My assessment of this today is that this has not happened. The KPK and KPA effectively refuse to implement the Court’s findings and approach in the Sevdari case with regard to art. 61(1) of the Vetting Law. This, in turn, leads to increased workload at the Court, leading them to not addressing the structural deficiencies of the vetting process, thus causing unnecessary grief to loads of prosecutors and judges.
The Cani case is far more interesting, because in this case we are not talking about a wrongful assessment, but about a complaint about the former KPA member Luan Daci. Daci had self-declared that he didn’t have any disciplinary measures enforced against him. This was ultimately proven to be a blatant lie, because he had been dismissed from office in 1997. Thanks to the insistence of several judges and prosecutors, including Cani, who filed criminal complaints against him, he was eventually found guilty and dismissed.
Cani did everything literally by the book. He complained about Daci’s appointment before the KPA, which claimed not to have any jurisdiction over the issue. He also complained at the Constitutional Court, which claimed to have nothing to do with the vetting process. This in inself is already a huge issue, because one of the attributes of a court is that it should be able to assess all the issues that fall within its jurisdiction. So when you go to a court and say that one of its members has been unlawfully appointed, the court should do something about that. The KPA chose not to do so, with the argument that under art. F(3) or the Constitutional Annex4 it does not have competence to address the constitutionality of the vetting principles. And this, if you will, is a huge blow to the court’s judicial character.
So on that basis, having exhausted all domestic remedies, Cani went to Strasbourg. And he won. However, the KPA continues to blatantly reject the Court’s judgment and continues to say it has no jurisdiction whatsoever to review the appointment of members of the vetting bodies, even if it has been established they were unlawfully appointed.
Then there is another issue. Under Albanian law there is a difference between the pazgjidhshmëri (inelectability) and the papërshtatshmëri (incompliance) of magistrates. In the latter case, you for example have a judge who gets arrested for corruption. He should be kicked out of the judicial body, but his dismissal will only affect the future. But the situation is different when it turns out there was a problem in their appointment from the very beginning, which is pazgjidhshmëri. In that case, under Albanian domestic law, there are concerns about all the decisions they have taken up to that point, because the deficiency stems from the fact of their unlawful appointment – which is the case with Daci.
What came out of the Cani case is that the Court ruled that a fundamental rule of a fair trial (having a tribunal established by law) had not been respected. That’s it, you go back to zero and you start again. So when Cani returns from Strasbourg, the question becomes, where should he apply to have his case reopened? The Court tentatively accepted a possible solution offered by the Albanian government that by analogy of the relevant principles of the Civil Procedural Code (since they are part of the legal framework of the vetting), a vetting case could be reopened by the KPA, even though the Vetting Law does not explicitly provide for that. My understanding is that the Court was not particularly convinced of this, because even the government was not sure, and just presented it as a possibility.
But Cani did not file a request to reopen his vetting case at the KPA; he filed a request for his reappointment to the KLP. Now the government said he lost his right to have his case reopened, because he didn’t do so in the four months after the Court’s decision. But Cani argued that the KPA cannot ensure him a right to fair trial, which is perfectly and accurately true. Because recently some other applicants, based on the argumentation of the Court in the Sevdari case, asked for the reopening of their cases. All of them were rejected with the KPA itself saying it had no possibility of reopening a case, unless there was an ECtHR judgment to that effect. So we can forget the government’s Civil Procedural Code solution here.
Now there is an interesting paragraph in one of these KPA decisions, saying that while it is true that there is no explicit provision for the reopening of vetting proceedings before the KPA, that this is no omission from the side of the lawmaker. Rather, the decision states, this is tied to the fact that the vetting has a specific timeframe.5 And this can also be seen by the fact that due to the limited number of KPA members, they cannot form a fresh panel to review requests for reopening.
So this then leads to the question why Cani should send a request for reopening to the KPA at all? The only result would be his case pending before the KPA sine die, without end – until the KPA’s mandate has ended and the cases would be transferred to the Constitutional Court. Why would he subject himself to that? This is someone who has been dismissed, who is unemployed, went all the way to Strasbourg, and then you basically tell him to start from scratch and wait for another couple of years before we actually decide on reopening your case?!
The way I see it, he did the most logical thing, which is to ask for reinstatement at the KLP. Again, on the basis of what I know from press reports, initially the KLP was in favor of reappointment. But there were different opinions by other stakeholders that this would go against the ECtHR verdict. This was one of the rare cases that the ONM made its position public.6 As far as I know, the request is still pending at the KLP, and it will be examined during a meeting of the Committee of Ministers in December, where as Res Publica we also filed a submission in this case. One of the recommendations that we’re making is that it should be the Constitutional Court proper that reviews cases about the election of KPA members; the KPA, after all, is a chamber of the Constitutional Court. This would solve a lot of problems but would require changes to the law.
You mentioned the role of the International Monitoring Operation in this particular case. The ONM has a significant role in the whole vetting process, but from the beginning it has been very unclear how this international body actually operates. What do we know about them and what are they actually doing?
The ONM has three hats. The first hat was taking part in the selection of the candidates for the vetting bodies and their placement on List A and List B. The issue here, as we discussed, was the lack of timeframe. There was also a certain degree of favoritism toward certain candidates, case in point being that of Albana Shtylla. In one of the ONM documents, it says regarding Shtylla that her skills and qualifications were not in doubt, but that there could have been concerns that up to that point, even after applying for a vetting body position, she was General Secretary of Parliament.7 Under international standards you cannot have civil servants being members of regulatory bodies of the judiciary, so the ONM suggested she could do either of two things to avoid any perception of conflict of interest etc.: resign or delegate her duties. She opted to do the latter. But why was the ONM so concerned with this particular candidate and not others? This is problematic, because the ONM is the vetting body of the candidates.
The second hat of the ONM is their judicial role. They draft opinions, take part in hearings, etc. There are two issues here. First of all, ONM observers take part not only in the proceedings, but they also join the vetting bodies when they retire to their private deliberations chambers. In my assessment, this is a very big issue. International domestic law is clear that in the deliberations chamber there should only be the judges. The presence of anyone else besides the judges without the presence of the defendant raises questions about the impartiality of the court. The presence of the ONM observer – with their translator, who will therefore be yet another person with knowledge about the judges’ thought about the assessee – is a huge affront to justice. Leaving aside the issue of the translator, obviously the ONM observer can express their opinion there during private deliberations, just as they have done during public proceedings. So here we have members of the KPA hearing only one side, and not the side of the assessee, which is a huge problem.
The second issue is the outspokenness of one of the ONM members, Theo Jacobs. I am concerned about his, let’s say, ill-tempered way of expression. I would like to single out his response in the case of Gerd Hoxha, who was confirmed by the KPA. Apparently the ONM observers thought differently. And there is this opinion that is pretty offensive to the Albanian state that the KPA was wrong and this verdict was an affront to the Albanian people.8 I find it very problematic when an international observer who is here thinks that he is talking on behalf of the Albanian people. The Albanian people have their own organs, their own will, make their own choices – they will pay for some of them, but at the end of the day it’s their decision. It’s definitely not up to Jacobs, or to me for that matter, to decide what is right and what is wrong. And at the end of the day this was a huge insult to Hoxha, whom the KPA after all confirmed in duty. It will take a bit more than platitudes to challenge the KPA in this case.
And this brings us to the ONM’s third hat. ONM members have the ability to request the launch of disciplinary proceedings against different vetting body members. My question is therefore the following: if the ONM observers were so concerned with the KPA decision in Hoxha’s case, why didn’t they ask for any measures against the KPA members? Why didn’t they put their money where their mouth is? My point here is that you have the ONM observers not taking the actions that they could if they were serious, but also basically slandering a judge who was confirmed.
As regards to who is a member of the ONM, the simple answer is: we don’t know. We know that there are some observers who came and left. For example, Willem Brouwer has left to the vetting commission in Moldova. So I decided to file a Freedom of Information request at the European Commission, requesting contract templates, terms of reference, documents setting out grounds of disciplinary or administrative liability – the standard boilerplate things. I got an answer from the Commission that they didn’t hold any such documents. Currently the ONM is co-financed by the Austrian Development Agency, so I then addressed my request to them. Perhaps they had the documents without sharing them with the European Commission, since they were the ones running the project and presumably signing the contracts with the observers. I did not get any answer from them.
So we are in a situation where we don’t really know the contours of what the ONM observers do. And we only know them when they have gone public, or when they have been involved in a judgment. This creates an issue, since they have a very important role to play in the day-to-day administration of the vetting bodies. At the very least we should know who they are and any codes of conduct they should abide to!
The Albanian government has framed the Justice Reform as dealing with the corruption in the judiciary. Now it turns out that the KPK members have actually spent some time in a luxury resort, Marina Bay, paid for by one of the big oligarchs, Shefqet Kastrati. What is going on there?
Before I answer this question, I would like to give a better overview to the background of the Justice Reform, because this is where you can position, in my eyes, its primordial sin. You remember the statements “Grab What You Can,” “Kap Çfarë të Kapësh,” etc. by the Prime Minister. The impression given at the time was that of the three branches, that the judiciary was venal to the core and it should be operated upon to excise that tumor. This is, I think, where the international community got it totally wrong. Rather, the problem was the ever-present influence of the executive on the judiciary. This is why it’s so interesting to see that even in the latest Rule of Law Report prepared by the European Commission there are concerns about the political interference of government officials in the work of the judiciary.
But this was not what the Justice Reform sought to address, and everything has been going downhill from that point. Because if you don’t define the problem correctly, you obviously are not going to take right measures to address it. I am not saying that before or currently there is no corruption in the judiciary, or that no measures should be taken. But no one is talking about the main issue, in my view.
Another example: Who was running the predecessor of the High Judicial Council (KLGj), the High Council of Justice (KLD)? The Ministry of Justice. Why didn’t this body do anything all these years? Why didn’t the successive ministers over the years do anything about the corrupt judges? Surely, they have a fair share in responsibility for the corruption in the judiciary. So those who are now vociferously supporting the Justice Reform actually didn’t do their bit in the previous years on this issue. So how far should we be willing to go to believe them, since they didn’t do anything before?
Successive governments had this “unholy pact” with parts of the judiciary, and for their own reasons they decided that they have to change things now, and this is how the idea of Justice Reform came about. On the face of it, for anyone who doesn’t know the Albanian situation you cannot find anything wrong with that; fighting corruption in the judiciary is a noble objective. But there is this risk that such an objective can be used as a pretext to enhance the grip that the government has on the judiciary. This leads me to the conclusion that you probably shouldn’t put too much belief in a government that continues to exercise control over the judiciary while telling you the main problem is corruption.
I cannot understand why Members of Parliament of the two big political parties, who are much to be blamed for the situation of Albania, would so willingly agree to a Justice Reform that ostensibly could lead to them being held liable for their actions and inactions. Either they are totally suicidal, or… I am willing to lead more toward the or bit.
Coming back to the question of the infamous KPK staff retreat. The fact that this wasn’t picked up shows the lack of any interest of the Albanian public in the Justice Reform, that they have given up on it. This is also borne out by different surveys, and was also shown by the lack of interest in Daci’s eventual dismissal from the KPA. In a society that was really trying to apply the rule of law, these should have been huge focal issues. But instead I see a certain kind of resignation: the Justice Reform has failed, let’s get on with our lives.
The vetting bodies are actually legally allowed to accept donations. I suppose this was thought about for example in the context of EU-funded projects, which is totally fine. I disagree with calling them “donations,” but at least it’s there in the law. The problem, in my eyes, started when I filed a request with the European Commission, and I got a redacted copy of a letter by the ONM to the KPK saying that they were informed about this staff retreat, and that it turned out that it had been the KPK who had solicited this donation by Kastrati. And you have the ONM writing that this is unacceptable, raising lots of ethical considerations.
What appears to have happened is that an insurance company belonging to the Kastrati Group had won a tender to insure the members of the KPK, which in itself is totally fine. But it seems that at some point, someone within the KPK used this as an argument to try to ask to get something from Kastrati in return. And that something in return was the staff retreat. Hence the ONM refers to it as soliciting a donation, knowing well what this implies.
I wrote back to the ONM suggesting that this obviously should be grounds for disciplinary proceedings. But I get an answer that, while this is a totally unfortunate and problematic incident – which it truly is – the ONM believes that accepting the donation was not grounds for launching disciplinary liability, because it was provided for by law. But the ONM’s letter talked about soliciting, not accepting. I find the ONM somewhat disingenuous in this respect, but it appears they are not going to do anything about it.
Furthermore, on the basis of this letter, the ONM has told the KPK that it should consult them with regard to any similar events in the future, which smacks a little bit of paternalism and is an insult to the integrity of the KPK members. Surely, you have vetted them and they know what is morally right and wrong. After all, they pass judgment on the moral transgressions, real or imagined, of other judges!
If we take this anecdote as emblematic of the current state of the Justice Reform, where do you think this is going to lead us eventually? How is this all going to end?
Being a lawyer, my interests are a bit more prosaic. I cannot give you the bigger picture. Right now my concern is regarding the fact that at the end of their mandate, the members of the KPA will be appointed as members of one of the appellate courts. So we might have the following paradoxical situation: former members of a chamber of the Constitutional Court, whose legal knowledge is questionable either because they were never judges or because they used to be judges a long time ago, and who have moreoever not taken the oath before the President according to the Constitution, appointed as appellate judges.
The vetting already has a very tarnished legacy. You have lots of judges and prosecutors who have been dismissed unfairly, you have deprived the judiciary of judges with a significant amount of experience, you have all those scandals breaking out in the School of Magistrates, with teaching staff that has been vetted out preparing the new generation of magistrates…
The European Commission Rule of Law Report mentions that the Albanian parliament refuses to abide by “some” of the rulings of the Constitutional Court, now about seven in total I think. So you have a government swearing by the rule of law etc., they cleaned the judiciary so there is no excuse anymore, and yet they still refuse to abide Constitutional Court judgments. My concern is that if such actions are not given the weight they should have, over time the Constitutional Court will more or less try to soften its stance. They would want the international partners of Albania to engage with this as an issue. If this continues, I fear that Albanian judges, believing they cannot count on the support of the internationals, will, so to speak, fall in line.
The internationals that are here today might leave tomorrow, the only power that will continue to stay is the Albanian state.
And thus we are back where we started.
Precisely.
Thank you.
The Albanian Mechanism is part of Manifesto GREAT WAVE.
According to Wikipedia, an amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) is “an individual or organization that is not a party to a legal case, but that is permitted to assist a court by offering information, expertise, or insight that has a bearing on the issues in the case.”
In the language of the ONM: “Their reasoned assessment and recommendations issued to the Albanian Parliament on the candidates, clearly stated that the IOs developed these on the basis of the best of the observers’ knowledge and on the basis of the information made available within the stringent timeframe provided by law.”
“The dismissal from office of the assessee shall be imposed as a disciplinary measure in the following cases: If it is determined that the assessee has declared more than twice the amount justified by legitimate income, including persons related to him or her.”
“The Appeal Chamber may require the collection of facts or evidence and remedy any procedural errors committed by the Commission taking into account the assessee’s fundamental rights. The Appeal Chamber shall decide the case and may not transfer the case back to the Commission. This constitutional jurisdiction does not allow to call into question the constitutionality of the principles on which the re-evaluation process is based on, and as such, it is based and the criteria set forth in this law.”
See the argumentation in KPA, Vendim rishikimi nr. 12, dt. 19.04.2024, §§12.6–12.9.
See the press statement of April 1, 2023 on the ONM [IMO] website:
The IMO Board learned with concern from public sources, that the High Prosecutorial Council is considering a draft decision that would have as effect the re-instatement of Mr Besnik Cani in the prosecutorial ranks.
The IMO has a mandate vested by the Constitution of Albania to oversee the entirety of the vetting process. If these sources are correct, based on its constitutional mandate, the IMO is of the opinion that such a decision would cast legal uncertainty and would contradict the final decision by the Special Appeal Chamber dismissing the assesse Besnik Cani during vetting, which is still in force.
The IMO took note of the decision of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in the case of Besnik Cani against Albania. Notably, the IMO notes that the ECtHR found that the most appropriate form of redress for the violation of the applicant’s right would be to reopen the judicial proceedings, should the applicant request such reopening. Moreover, the IMO notes that the ECtHR expressly refused the request of Mr. Cani to reinstate him immediately in his former office, in view also of the nature of the violation that was found in respect of the applicant’s vetting proceedings.
In this respect, the IMO stresses that all final vetting decisions remain in force until the case is reopened and reviewed by the competent court upon request of the interested party.
It is of paramount importance to ensure that all State institutions and judicial authorities respect the independence and the exclusive jurisdiction of the vetting bodies, as enshrined in the Albanian Constitution, and refrain from taking actions which directly contradict final vetting decisions.
The International Monitoring Operation will continue to monitor the thoroughness of the vetting process, including its full compliance with human rights and principles underlying the system of the European Convention of Human Rights.
As mentioned in the minutes of the session on June 2, 2017 of the Third Ad-Hoc Committee for the Selection of Vetting Institution Candidates, by Chair Vasilika Hysi: “OMN-ja në raportin mbi rekomandimet që i ka paraqitur komisionit, në faqen 17 “Vrojtime të tjera”, e ka trajtuar problemin e aplikantes Albana Shtylla, ku ka kërkuar që ajo të tërhiqet nga pozicioni i saj ose të delegojë një rol në menaxhimin administrativ dhe është e vërtetë që zonja Shtylla e ka deleguar.”
In his dissenting opinion, dated February 21, 2024, Jacobs declares: “The Justice Reform, the vetting process, this Special Appeals Chamber, and the Albanian citizens deserved more and better than this decision.”