The Assembly of Albania violated the Constitution for Olta Xhaçka

In an unprecedented vote, the socialist majority voted in April against the decision of the Constitutional Court, which asked it to send for interpretation to this court the mandate of the socialist MP Olta Xhaçka, whose husband was declared a strategic investor by the government.

On Wednesday, the Constitutional Court called this vote unconstitutional and decided to "force" the Assembly to vote again "without delay" on sending Xhaçka's mandate for interpretation to this body.

Set in motion by a lawsuit of the democratic parliamentary group, this court decided: "the annulment of decision no. 41/2024, dated 11.04.2024 'On not sending the motion to the Constitutional Court' of the Assembly of Albania, as incompatible with the Constitution of the Republic of Albania'.

Also, it established the "obligation" of the Assembly to send the motion for interpretation to this court.

The president of this court, Olta Zaçaj, reading this decision in front of the media, said that "within this decision-making, the Court emphasizes that the Assembly bears the obligation to execute this decision without delay".

"The Assembly of Albania has called into question the binding power of its decision, by not implementing Article 132, point 1, of the Constitution, which provides that the decisions of the Constitutional Court are final and binding for implementation," she said while reading the decision.

Socialists claimed that the court could not force the deputies how to vote because they were independent in their decision-making, but according to the decision of the Constitutional Court they were obliged to implement the decision of this court.

However, the Constitutionalist expresses explicitly about the obligation that her decisions carry.

"The court reiterated that its decisions have the effect of the force of law. No body has the right to question them and even more so to refuse to implement them. The indisputable impact of its decisions is such that it imposes the binding force of its decision on all state bodies. This binding effect has to do with both the ordering part and the reasoning part of the decision" - it is argued in the decision.

Once again, the court reminds the MPs that "they must vote in accordance with the order of the Court, as this vote is not an ordinary parliamentary procedure and as such has nothing to do with the principle of the non-binding mandate of the MP, but is within the framework of execution of the Court's decision".

In yesterday's decision-making of the CJK, a last request of the Assembly that tried to suspend the consideration of this issue and send it for an advisory opinion by the Venice Commission was rejected.

This is the second decision of the Constituent Assembly that has caught the decisions of the Assembly, taken by the socialist majority regarding the mandate of Xhaçka, in violation of the Constitution.

Even in January 2023, the court declared as unconstitutional the November 2022 vote of the socialist majority through which the opposition's motion for the mandate of the SP deputy was defeated.

The issue of Xhaçka's mandate has created a precedent in the relations between the Assembly and the Constitutional Court, avoiding the previous parliamentary practice, when the Assembly decided to send the mandates of deputies to the court for interpretation in cases where there were accusations against them or indications that they violated Article 70 of the Constitution, which prohibits them from benefiting from public goods.

In this case, the majority has used deadlines and parliamentary procedures to delay its consideration in the parliamentary bodies and with a political decision it has protected its MP by rejecting twice the opposition's request to send this issue to the Constitutional Court for interpretation./ BIRN