On Saturday morning a group of citizens protested in front of Parliament against changes made to Criminal Procedural Code art. 449, which does not allow for a case in which the defendant has received a final sentence to be reopened, if additional incriminating evidence comes to surface that would increase that sentence.
Before the changes, the Code allowed retrial within five years from the date of the final sentence. The change was approved in Parliament despite recommendations of the EU technical assistance mission Euralius, which had sent to the Parliament a text that removed the five year restraint and allowed the retrial at any time.
While the whole country is talking about vetting, while the Prime Minister accuses the opposition for blocking the judicial, while foreign ambassadors and politicians continue to yell for vetting and reform, and while all the people exclaim that the justice system is corrupted, the majority of the government quietly approves a bill that goes completely in the other direction and all the followers of the reform stay silent. The Prime Minister is silent (the true author of change), the opposition is silent, the foreign ambassadors are silent, civil society is silent, and the 97 percent of the population that wanted the judicial reform is silent.
The main argument brought forth by the Prime Minister Rama to attack the resistance of opposition is that the crisis is made up, and this he argues is because people in the tent are only militants. The Prime Minister’s reasoning is that if there really was a crisis then the citizens would be on the square with the opposition but since this isn’t the case there isn’t a crisis and the actions of the opposition are a plot against the judicial reform, desired by the people to condemn the corrupted politicians.
But reality seems to be totally different and much more bitter.
The protest on Saturday shows that the people don’t care about an amendment that saves criminals who have corrupted the courts in exchange for freedom.
As has happened in the past, the argument in favor of reform was the right one, but as always, the one who has used it had his own shady, even manipulative reasons, only to get what he wanted, and that is power.
Even those who were against, who are trusted by the public and are not party militants, are met with a “bad” insult by Albanian society: “idealists,” which in most cases means being an idiot, childish, naive, irrational, not a pragmatist, etc.
Now there is proof that everybody lies, that everybody wants to profit, politicians want votes, foreign diplomats want fame, entrepreneurs want money and our hard work, traders want to sell expired goods, your neighbor takes over the parking space, even practitioners of faith are after our properties.
So our society sees everything with a sense of pessimism, has doubts about any possible source of freedom and has been completely sedated.
Many years spent under communism have rooted into the Albanian society pragmatism, material analysis of the world, logic based only on material interests, that devalues everyone who follows an ideal.
