In a press statement titled “We Are Late,” the Albanian Helsinki Committee (AHC) has sounded the alarm about the absence of any meaningful electoral reform since the previous elections.
The AHC notes that today marks the end of the 6-month mandate of the bipartisan Special Parliamentary Commission on Electoral Reform, while “there is no information on whether consensus has been reached on any important issue that has been addressed or whether work has begun on writing the draft-amendments to this Code.”
The McAllister+ agreement preceding the June 2017 parliamentary elections in fact explicitly included the intention of both opposition leader Lulzim Basha and Prime Minister Edi Rama to work on a bipartisan electoral reform, based on the 75 OSCE/ODIHR recommendations from their 2013, 2015, 2017 reports, none of which have been implemented so far.
