TIRANA, July  14 /ATA/ The Socialist Party MP Arben Pëllumbi presented Friday in the Assembly the majority report on the request of the Special Prosecutor’s Office against Corruption and Organized Crime, seeking authorization from the Assembly for the arrest and the exercise of home search of MP Arben Ahmetaj.

In the plenary session, Pëllumbi stated that, “we have in front of us a report prepared by the prosecution body, which must be confronted in court with the person under investigation, our colleague, and the court is the only body that must deliver the final decision, so until that stage, all of us, including the left and the right, and anyone else who have some grasp of the justice system, must be aware  of the presumption of innocence.”

Second, Pëllumbi added, “we are not here to hand out political verdicts like Mr. Bardhi did. He mentioned a lot of names, he mentioned colleagues, he mentioned many times the prime minister of the country, and let me say that his name does not exist anywhere in the Prosecutor’s Office report. Nonetheless, you can do this Mr. Bardhi, you can do it wherever and whenever, but not in a session like this.”

While reading the report, Pëllumbi stated that, although the meeting of the Council for Regulation, Mandates and Immunity was held behind closed doors to keep the investigative secrecy, unfortunately this did not happen, as parts of the acts came out in the media, even before starting review in the Council. Under the guise of justifying public information, Albanian society still does not see the standard of preserving investigative secrecy consolidated. The lack of this standard prejudices justice, success of its legal results, undermines public confidence in the justice system and creates an enabling environment for unjust attacks on citizens, who for this reason cannot publicly clarify their position as they are not guaranteed the right to protect the dignity of the person affected by the disclosure of investigative secrets and in some cases even worse by misrepresenting secret investigative information. It is the duty of anyone who becomes aware of the investigative secret to preserve it, and it is the duty and responsibility of the justice bodies to establish standards through legal measures to prevent the leakage of the investigative secret.”

“We, the majority MPs deem that the procedure behind closed doors would guarantee the investigative secrecy, which is the primary interest of justice, but which in fact was not preserved in this procedure and under these conditions, when this guarantee of investigative secrecy is breached, it would have been better for the process to be open so that any information could be heard by the public in a bid to close any avenue for misuse of the information obtained from secret investigative documentation, or from any  misinformation intended to distort the truth,” Pëllumbi said.

“The Council for Regulation, Mandates and Immunity assesses that it is precisely this spirit and the highest standard that will have to be taken into account and evaluated whenever, based on the relevant provisions of the Constitution and the Rules of the Assembly, the body that by the Constitution has the title of exercising the criminal prosecution, the Special Prosecutor’s Office in this case turns to the parliament to request authorization,” underlined Pëllumbi.

“It is only the court, the only body that can examine, evaluate and ultimately handle the requests of the prosecution body during the preliminary investigations in case it eventually finds them based on the evidence and the law. It is the court that guarantees respect for human rights in all aspects of the criminal process. The due legal process, the procedural safeguards, the conditions and criteria that are provided for in the procedural law, as well as the implementation of the principle of proportionality of the security measure with the requests and the evidence that are presented for judgment,” Pëllumbi said.

/sm/