Albanian Government Council of Ministers

First National Anti-Corruption Conference kicked off on Monday following the release of the Annual National Anti-Corruption Report for 2021, the work on which was coordinated by the Minister of State for the Standards and Services, Milva Ekonomi, and the State Minister for Protection of Entrepreneurship, Edona Bilali.

The three-day conference being held at the Palace of Congresses in Tirana focuses on two main pillars, namely the overhaul of Albania’s justice system and reformation of the public service delivery system through digitization as an effective tool to combat corruption. The conference will take stock of the accomplishments and the challenges facing in the daily fight against corruption, the state’s relation with the citizens and these outcomes and issues will be shared with all the heads of the institutions tasked with delivering public services. On its first day, the conference’s proceedings focused on the judicial reform in the country.

Prime Minister Edi Rama delivered a speech to the conference, noting that despite a series of issues still to be resolved, “it is easily obvious that Albania has already started to clearly distance itself from a phase, when corruption stood at the very base of the relation between the state and the citizens.”

* * *

Hello everyone and thank you for your presence, especially our guest friends who are accompanying us as our partners along this very difficult and bumpy path.

I would like to first appreciate both the Minister of State for the Standards and Services, Milva Ekonomi, and the State Minister for Protection of Entrepreneurship, Edona Bilali for jointly coordinating whole effort for the first annual national anti-corruption report, as well as this National Conference designed to primarily reveal the outcomes of this daily fight along the entire front of the state-citizen relation and, on the other hand, to share these results and issues with all the heads of institutions and other officials tasked with delivering public services.

We deemed it appropriate to associate the release of this Anti-Corruption report with this national conference as we think that it is crucially important to share with the public the difficulties and seek to make this perspective a continued and never-ending challenge that needs to be addressed even in some of the most developed nations around the world.  The conference will reveal that Albania has already started to clearly distance itself from a phase, when corruption stood at the base of the system of the state-citizen relation.

It was not 30, but just a few years ago when public services were delivered in person and in direct contact with the citizens, even when it comes to basic and monthly services like settling the electricity bill, with the citizens having to stay and wait on long queues for them to be given the opportunity to pay their bills.

As many as 300 000 public services were delivered in person each month and such contacts with the citizens were marred with continued arbitrariness, total lack of quality in service delivery, total lack of transparency, long delays and bribery.

On the other hand, the system was totally gripped by the cancer of a profoundly corrupt, largely rotten and a bazaar-like justice system, with justice being bought and sold, although the honest and professional individuals were part of this system, but the system as a whole made it impossible either for competent and honest people to be promoted or for ordinary and innocent people to be guaranteed by justice system.

Therefore, we focused on both directions; namely reforming the justice system, on one side, and reforming the public service delivery system, on the other. A special panel discussion will focus on the justice system reform as part of this conference and therefore I wouldn’t comment further on this issue, but I would like to emphasize a fact on which I think we all agree upon, regardless of our political beliefs and affiliations, regardless of discontent over this or that government policy, even regardless of the political affiliations of anyone; until a few years ago, nobody had ever thought that high-level politicians would be punished by the justice system. Did anyone ever think until a few years ago that the day would come – just few years after the launch of justice reform – nobody, including cabinet members, local government authorities, MPs, would feel untouchable? Nobody had ever thought that high-level officials and politicians would be put under investigation and face charges by a prosecutor, totally independent from politics and completely focusing on his or her mission to do justice.

Just a few years ago, I don’t think any of you here in this very room would answer positively to the question: “Do you really believe this would be the case?” And this is the case not with former cabinet members or mayors from the opposition, but with cabinet members and mayors of the governing party.

We once had cabinet members being shot, but this was the case under a different system. We are talking about a system where the powers are separate and where the separation of powers is embodied in the independent activity of the judiciary, independent from the government or the legislative power.

This is a major moment despite all the shortcomings, deficiencies or the weaknesses of a process that has never taken place before and that is still in its initial steps in this country. It is an extremely big challenge and it never happened.

Albania has never had a fair or independent justice system from politics or the ruling party in any of periods in its history, whether during the monarchic rule, communist regime or during earlier periods and the years prior to the justice system reform and this is a fact. It is an extremely important and very encouraging fact, although this is a process that has its ups and downs, but that it is nevertheless the right process moving ahead in the right direction.

This is all I had to say about the justice system and I will go on with the government system reform. All too often, corruption and the fight against corruption are wrongfully identified with just what the justice system does and who was sent to jail or who is facing charges and is standing trial. This is only one side. The other side is the one that has to do with the state-citizen relationship and justice in everyday life, with individuals not committing a criminal offence per se, but where the law is violated, often flagrantly.

Let’s consider some of the aspects concerning the everyday life of everyone. The parents know quite well what it took to enrol their children in the university. They know pretty well how tough it was for them to enrol their children in public universities if their family name was not an important and influential one, if their economy didn’t allow them to pay bribes. They also know that education was denied to their children because they had no direct political affiliation or a party membership document and instead the children of other people were granted university enrolment under a system that was not based on merit. So, the university enrolment system was not fair. How many years have passed since then as not a single complaint was reported following the reform implemented by Lindita Nikolla as the then Minister of Education, when university enrolment took place under a merit-based and digital system. A totally transparent platform avoiding corruption practices.

Let’s consider the teachers’ recruitment in the education system. What were the chances one stood just a few years ago to take up a job position as a teacher if you were not to enjoy the support of an influential individual, if you were not directly affiliated with the governing party or if you were not to pay a hefty bribe? How many teachers are today at their merit-based job position thanks to the teachers’ digital recruitment platform after having been forced to wait for so many years for their recruitment door to open? And “strangely” enough the would-be teachers on the waiting list were mostly the ones with the highest scores compared to others, but they lacked any of the components I already mentioned to join the unjust system that ensured them a job position.

This was the case with the nurses’ recruitment too. One stood no chance of taking up a job position as a nurse if he or she lacked a party membership document, mostly of the political party heading the Ministry of Health, and therefore whole nurses’ recruitment was transformed into a party recruitment system. Such a system is unimaginable today, because all the nurses are now recruited under a digital platform, namely nurses for Albania.

State Police members and officers were recruited through some notes that lawmakers representing various constituencies from all over the country used to send to the Minister of Interior, who was normally a member of the parliamentary group of the governing party and the quality of the State Police force was consequently determined by the quality of human resources out of the lawmakers’ pockets over the years. This is unimaginable today. One cannot join the State Police system without graduating from the Police Academy first. There was no Police Academy previously as they shut it down and no police school was operational, and instead police officers had to simply attend a course and the ones to join the State Police were mainly political party-membership document holders, or individuals willing to pay bribes to influential officials and recruitment process was not part of a merit-based system.

Consider how the number of female police officers has changed and this is for a good reason. The number of female officers within the ranks of the State Police previously was very limited, because the recruitment proposals were made from the political rallies to the Minister’s table and of course the majority of the protestors were boys and men. This has totally changed now, just like the public administration recruitment process has also changed. However, having this said, I want to make it clear to everyone that I am not suggesting that this effort is now over, because there are still certain parts of the system that need to be reformed. And this is a problem we should keep trying to solve.

I would now focus on the digital revolution, namely the transfer of all services to the citizens’ smart-phones and personal computers at home or wherever else. It is no longer necessary for one to report at the public offices in person to obtain a public service, as every public service is now delivered online, except for certain services for which physical presence is a must. All other public services are now delivered via the online platform only. All business real-time transactions are carried out online now. And it is not an accident that Albania is on par with the highest-income countries in terms of performance in delivering online public services.

And this is confirmed on all the international reports, and paradoxically enough the area on which Albania ranks among the undeveloped countries is the private sector, where we need to make greater efforts to make sure that the private sector is elevated to the level of the public sector.

Further on, I would like to point out the public procurement system reform. The public procurement system has undergone an unimaginable transformation, if we are to compare to the system’s performance before we embarked on its transformation and report we have compiled and which is a factual report, offering no interpretation and no subjectivity, but facts only, and it clearly reveals that we have moved forward on the right direction in this respect too. However, a number of issues have yet to be resolved in this area too, because if we were to claim that the tender procedures in Albania are totally transparent and absolutely equal for all the operators, then not only the accession negotiations would have been opened, but Albania would have been a full-fledged member of the EU by now. We have yet to move up there and that’s why preparations are already underway to launch a new phase designed to free the public administration from all the huge burden of this process, namely the process of contracting public funds through tenders by employing foreign expertise and even international companies so that the public administration carries out the duties it is tasked with, whereas the tender procedures are conducted by independent and highly professional structures, because one of the major problems we encounter are not simply the corrupt procedures or intentional deviation from the law to reap illicit benefits, but it is also the incompetence to build totally professional, transparent, just and quality processes.

A lot really remains to be done in this respect. I don’t want to take more time, because this is actually a long conference and it will largely tackle all the issues of the fight against corruption, but I would like to conclude my speech by commenting on the co-governance platform, which has provided people with an increasingly reliable tool that citizens are now widely using and which has become a more important one given that all the public services are now delivered online only.

The State Cadastre Agency services have gone online too. Citizens no longer need to report in person at the Agency offices, wait in long queues or make efforts to seek the help of influential people or the so-called middlemen to arrange things so that they can obtain the property ownership certificates. However, the cycle has yet to be ultimately complete and a closed one. This means that everyone can file their applications via the online platform, yet you have to wait for the document to be delivered via the post office and along this whole process there are of course cases when the deadlines are not met and there are even cases when the service is not delivered. To this end, the co-governance platform is in place to ensure interaction between the citizen, who has failed to obtain the service, and the government, which most interested to make sure that this whole system provides full guarantees until the process enters a closed cycle, with the responses provided online so that the citizens are delivered and obtain what they are entitled to without paying anything and without having to seek support from influential individuals or affiliate with this or that political party.

I would like to sincerely express my appreciation to all of those who worked on compiling this report. I would kindly suggest all the public and state administration bodies to read it, not only the part concerning each of these institutions, but read the report as a whole information that in my view every citizen needs as it primarily concerns the public services. I would like to conclude the speech by expressing full confidence in the process of transformation to free our country from this age-old disease, which is a disease of backwardness and I do not agree with the theory that there are some peoples who are more corrupt than other peoples. If we were to take a number of German citizens and appoint them to the Cadastre Agency office in Saranda and let them work for 40 days there, you would see that the Germans would become corrupt too. The same would happen with the current Saranda Cadastre office employees if they were to be transferred to work at Germany’s cadastre service, where they would never cross their mind to ask for a bribe in exchange of a service, because it is the system itself that prevents them from doing so. In other words this is not a matter of nations with certain inclinations or trends, but it is a matter of systems and we will definitely build this system that would allow us to turn it into a great blessing of the technology.

Digital technology is a gift to the developing countries have been blessed with, because such technology provides these countries the opportunity to make significant leaps and progress that otherwise they would never be able to deliver on, as linear gradual development by traditional tools would make it impossible for a country like Albania to reach the rest of the world within a reasonable time span. Meanwhile, exponential development through technology provides us with the opportunity to make unimaginable leaps. Therefore we must strongly believe, be willing and confident that Albania will be a modern country by 2030 in terms of state-citizens relations  to the point that corruption as a widespread and endemic disease will be history and definitely the fight against corruption will continue at all levels just like such an effort goes on in the United States of America too, where corruption also exists, just like this fight continues in the European Union where corruption practices absolutely exist, but corruption there takes place at a completely different level that doesn’t directly affect the rights of the citizens, who are equal before the law and who are guaranteed for their merit.

Thank you!

© Albanian Government 2022 - All rights reserved.