Prime Minister Edi Rama today presented Mr. Besfort Lamallari as the new Minister of Justice. In a meeting with the administration of the Ministry, the Prime Minister emphasized the importance of the passing of the baton at a key moment for Albania on the path towards membership in the European Union.

Minister Lamallari is expected to lead with dedication and integrity the reform processes that touch the essence of Albanian justice. His role will be decisive in guaranteeing an independent and functional justice as the foundation of the rule of law and of the European future of the country.

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Speech of Prime Minister Edi Rama:

Greetings and thank you for your presence!

The role and the weight of the Ministry of Justice are just as important as they have been, and above all the obligation that the Ministry of Justice has to constantly hold the guiding compass for all decision-making processes is a very big obligation. Meanwhile, as you also know, the territory covered by justice issues in the Albanian state is the territory that occupies the largest place in the process of accession negotiations, and it is very important that in all our daily life and yours as the team of the Ministry of Justice, we do not lose from attention the essence of our mission in relation to justice, which is to guarantee and to consolidate the guarantee of our judicial system as a constitutional power independent from the executive on paper, but only for a very few years independent also in reality.

It is an independence that is far from being guaranteed forever, and it is precisely us who must guarantee it and consolidate it in this phase by insisting on that historic decision that we have taken to keep our hands away from the decision-making of prosecutors and judges.

I believe that this reminder is very important for all of you, both for the political leadership of the Ministry, but also for the civil service of the Ministry, because this is a great national mission that will in the end make the difference — whether Albania will be a member country of the EU with an independent justice as in every EU country, guaranteed once and for all, or whether Albania will fall into the temptation of going backwards by putting at risk even membership in the EU. And here it is not the issue that in no way should we allow Albania to fall into the temptation of going backwards because of the EU.

Therefore, beyond all the problems, because you are here, you have all the professional capacities, and in a way, also because of your duty, you are more attentive and you see closely the developments of this process of independence, and you see closely also all the difficulties that materialize also in great pains — great pains as a result of the violation of freedoms, of the violation of rights, of the violation of the spirit and the letter of the Constitution.

But we have made our choice and we do not change on this point. We do not change, and you are obliged that these kinds of pains — which unlike you, here I speak for the civil service, we experience as part also of our political being, whether when someone among us sins for unlawful gains, or when the independent justice sins, by using disproportionately its force — we have no other solution, no other solution, no other way.

Meanwhile what we must continue to do together is to improve the standards, which for example materializes in the big work that awaits the Ministry of Justice to give the final form to the official version that the government will send to parliament for the Penal Code, for the Code of Procedure, and for the Civil Code as well.

On the other hand, the Ministry has a very big burden in the process of accession negotiations, and it is positive that at the head of the Ministry comes one of our most distinguished negotiators in the process of negotiations, who naturally has covered that part of the trench of negotiations that belonged to the Ministry of Internal Affaires, but here are capacities and here also are the challenges that are directly linked with the fundamentals.

The negotiations for membership have revealed to us the reality – at least I speak for myself – a reality that we did not know as we should have: the reality of a considerable professional strength in our public administration.

Of course our administration has problems, but that our frontline administration would emerge from a process where other countries — there have been countries that came out very well, there have been countries that did not come out well, so not all come out well there — and that it would come out with applause, really this is a very strong reason to feel motivated and to have the conviction that we can do much more and we can do much better, because all those who participated were strongly challenged, it was a challenging exam, and they successfully overcame this kind of strong challenge.

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Diella is developing at an unknown speed with this process.

For all of you and for all the administration of the ministries that must be strongly engaged to bring artificial intelligence into every corner of activity, in parallel with the transfer of the legal corpus of the EU that gives us the opportunity to be this ambitious to close the negotiations in 2027, where besides reforms, commitments and all the results of us people, we need precisely artificial intelligence because physically it would be impossible that the 4 thousand and some hundred laws and sub-legal acts necessary for the fulfillment of the technical conditions to be done with translators and human jurists.

The cleaning of our legislation from overlaps. We have a jungle of laws and decisions of the Council of Ministers that contradict one another and that have been made in many years, suddenly, without thinking, and then it turns out that we can be hostage of some law from ’56 even though we live in another system. And this work must be carried forward and will be a normal thing that with humans cannot be done, to go in and to see all the overlaps in the laws and to clean all the legislation from the overlaps. But we must go further.

We must go further. We must think about mediation with artificial intelligence in civil cases. What I strongly believe, and we must all share this belief, is that digital technology and artificial intelligence are the blessing of developing countries, because they give us the opportunity to make leaps that we would never make in conditions of linear progress. How could we, in such a short time as technology made possible, provide services for citizens if we did not have technology and did not have the e-Albania platform? Imagine for a moment Covid and without the e-Albania platform, how could people be served without everyone going out into the street to keep their place in the queue.

Today thanks to technology we have a service that developed countries do not have. Of course, they have much more structured administrations, but they do not have this, and like this there are many others that we can do with much more speed.

There can be several questions for Diella. Meanwhile what Diella will do is very simple, very, very simple. What happens with tenders and where corruption enters into a tendering process. In two phases the process has weaknesses, weaknesses that corruption exploits.

The first phase is the terms of reference that can be made oriented, as was an epic tender in the time before we took office in 2013, where to build a tunnel, a criterion was put that the company must also have experience in musical systems.Then, in the terms of reference, Diella makes impossible the preferential treatment of someone through references, and for this we are working.

Secondly, all the endless documents that companies make and collect here and there will be public.

Thank you very much once again!