TIRANA, September 30 /ATA/ – Prime Minister Edi Rama stated today that the direct involvement in drafting the new Criminal Procedure Code safeguards—anchored in European standards of discipline and integrity—was essential to this success.
“The critical support of the Italian and French governments granted us access to world-class expertise,” they stated, “while the insights of Italian, French, and Dutch professors and magistrates provided the deep comparative analysis this reform required,” stated Rama during presentation of the package.
The Head of Government thanked everyone involved, “not only for their unquestionable professionalism, but also for their impressive readiness to assist.”
He emphasized that, “This package is not ours alone; it required high-precision legal expertise to navigate democracy’s most delicate balancing act. It directly addresses the tension between society’s need for criminal protection through the courts, and the individual’s right to be protected from judicial error or abuse.” Precisely for this reason, the prime minister continued, we chose to entrust its drafting to 19 academics and magistrates from Italy, France, and the Netherlands—working alongside Council of Europe experts and with the active support of the Italian and French Ministries of Justice.
According to him, the Albanian technical secretariat merely coordinated this vast undertaking.
“The more than 100 articles in this package are the result of hundreds of hours of work and debate among experts who—deliberately—hail from diverse legal traditions, all under the rigorous oversight of the Council of Europe; the Council has certified every step of the process, as well as the final document now ready to serve as the basis for public consultation,” Rama said.
Further on, Rama stated, “There is not a single ‘Albanian-style’ patch-up job or any externally imported weapon in those 105 articles; every solution has been cross-referenced to our Constitution, Constitutional Court rulings, the Supreme Court’s unifying decisions, the case law of the Strasbourg Court and EU law.”
“The Council of Europe has vetted the package against the Convention and European standards, recognizing it as a project that enhances the transparency of criminal proceedings and genuinely expands defense rights. For us, this serves as the best guarantee that we are undertaking another reform to modernize the justice system and Europeanize the Albanian state—a reform ensuring that criminal proceedings begin with the premise of liberty, rather than with imprisonment as the starting point,” said Rama. /p.s./
