The Supreme Court of Justice rejects the ILD's request for disciplinary proceedings against the Tirana judge

2025-06-04 14:09:00, Aktualitet CNA

The Supreme Court of Justice rejects the ILD's request for disciplinary

The High Judicial Council rejected in today's meeting the request of the High Inspector of Justice for disciplinary proceedings with the measure "Public reprimand" against magistrate AP, judge at the Court of First Instance of General Jurisdiction of Tirana, for failure to respect the reasonable deadline for submitting the reasoned decision.

The ILD has launched an initiative investigation against the judge, based on the findings of the ILD's thematic inspection report, " On the procedure for announcing and justifying judicial decisions of the Court of First Instance of General Jurisdiction of Tirana (Civil Chamber) and the Administrative Court of First Instance of Tirana", for the final decisions issued by these courts for the period 01.09.2022 - 30.12.2022.

After a case-by-case analysis, this inspection resulted in the fact that in the Court of First Instance of General Jurisdiction of Tirana, 89% of the decisions were submitted within the 120-day deadline. This deadline was assessed as the reasonable time needed by the judge/court to submit the final reasoned decision, as only this deadline can make the difference and serve as a reasonable time in the concrete situation of workload, staffing and number of magistrates, or typology of cases tried, between the need to justify and submit all judicial decisions according to the deadline provided for in Article 308 of the Code of Civil Procedure and the possibility and current capacities of the Court of First Instance of General Jurisdiction of Tirana to respect this deadline.

The inspection followed the start of verifications for the judges of the First Instance Court of General Jurisdiction in Tirana, for decisions announced and submitted with justifications to the secretariat after 120 days from the announcement.

The disciplinary investigation against Judge AP for failure to comply with the reasonable deadline for submitting the reasoned decision included 21 decisions submitted late. For the delay of 2 years and 4 months, the ILD has requested proceedings, while for the other delays, the ILD has closed the investigation and sent the materials to the Supreme Court of Justice for professional assessment of the magistrate.

The investigation found that the magistrate committed a disciplinary violation through negligence; the delays noted for a long time in the reasoning of the three judicial decisions; the delays in the reasoning of the judicial decisions are not justified by reasonable personal, health, or family reasons, despite the fact that they are directly related to the magistrate. As a result of the judge's inaction, the prestige of the judge's figure has been damaged, as well as the public's trust in justice, even in the conditions when the magistrate has over 19 years of seniority as a judge, an indicator of her very good knowledge of the role of exercising the duties of a magistrate with ethics and discipline.

During the investigation, the ILD considered as mitigating circumstances the magistrate's failure to take any disciplinary measure and the cooperative behavior during the disciplinary investigation, concluding that the actions/inactions of Judge AP constitute a "Minor Violation" of discipline and proposing to the High Judicial Council the disciplinary measure "Public reprimand" for Judge AP, provided for by Article 105, point 1, letter "b", section "i" and Article 107 of Law No. 96/2016 "On the Status of Judges and Prosecutors in the Republic of Albania", as amended.

In today's session, the High Judicial Council decided to reject the request of the High Inspector of Justice./CNA