On March 25, the Constitutional Court will determine the lawsuit of Prime Minister Edi Rama against President Ilir Meta for refusing to decree ex-Foreign Minister Gent Cakaj.
The trial date was published in the calendar of hearing on the institution’s website.
In January 2019, Prime Minister Rama sued President Meta in the Constitutional Court after he refused to decree Gent Cakaj as Foreign Affairs Minister.
The Constitution of Albania specifies that the minister is appointed by the president upon the proposal of the prime minister.
Meta refused to decree the nomination of Gent Cakaj as Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs of Albania. arguing that his candidacy did not meet the necessary conditions to hold the post of Foreign Minister. According to the President, he lacks experience in politics, diplomacy, administration, state affairs.
In addition to this, there were issues surrounding his security clearance which was approved in just 24 hours, despite Cakaj having lived in Hungary, Kosovo, and Belgium.
This led to disagreements between the government and the President.
Meta’s assessment was that the government-dependent NSA did not fully investigate Cakaj’s background before providing him with security clearance certificates at the national, NATO, and EU levels.
Rama then took the position of Foreign Minister and immediately delegated responsibilities to Cakaj.
In a previous article, we have mentioned that this dispute is unlikely to go be considered by the Constitutional Court after the 6-month deadline has passed.
Specifically, Article 55 of the Law on the Constitutional Court stipulates that this court may review such an agreement within a period of six months from the moment of dispute. This means that the Constitutional Court had to review this dispute by June 2019.
Due to justice reform, the Constitutional Court was defunct at the time of the dispute and only became operational in December 2020.
