It Took This Calamity for the Judges to Learn Their Own Salaries

Mero Baze

Until now, the entire debate over the failure of the Justice Reform has focused on its institutional architecture: SPAK’s blackmailing hold over the courts, a bad judicial map that has multiplied the backlog of cases and the suffering of people trying to obtain justice, and the absence of an effective oversight institution capable of doing the job the High Justice Inspectorate does not do.

But the debate opened by the issue of magistrates’ salaries, their taking the law into their own hands, treating the state budget like a self-service shop and, worse still, fighting court battles on their own behalf, in blatant conflict of interest and in breach of Albania’s Treasury law, shows that even if every other element of the Justice Reform were in order, we still would not have judges and prosecutors.

Yesterday SPAK went into the offices of the State Treasury and seized documents, terrorising employees and sending the message that the government must not dare go to war with the Prosecutors’ Republic.

A number of swaggering judges, one looking like Kim Jong’s son and another like Trump’s son, are making threats as though they had nuclear weapons to deploy against the government if they are not paid as much as they themselves demand, rather than what Parliament has approved.

For the first time, Albania, and perhaps the world, is watching a primitive confrontation between the Republic of Prosecutors and Judges and the Republic of Albania, with the former intent on showing the latter that they are the real republic.

People who can delay a court case for fifteen years could not wait fifteen days for Parliament to pass the salary law, as it did yesterday. Instead, they proclaimed a law of their own and continue to demand that it be enforced.

Worse still, in the name of their own power, they continue to threaten the legislative branch, the executive branch and the institution of the President of the Republic.

The whole spectacle makes your stomach turn, not because of the consequences this conflict will have, but because you finally see the people in whom you placed your hopes for carrying out the Justice Reform.

This case alone should be enough for everyone to understand that even if we had designed the best justice reform in the world, we would still have failed, because we would have left it in the hands of these same people.

Just look at how they trample every law of the Republic and every constitutional standard in the country, all for the sake of their own salaries. Salaries which, in fact, most of them never even knew the size of.

Originally published in Albanian as: Ra ky mort e gjyqtarët po mësojnë rrogat e tyre