Montenegro’s Council of Justice may force out its only ethnic-Albanian member

“Medenica doesn’t want Loro Makiqi in the Council of Justice”, says a headline in the website of Vijesti newspaper, on March 30th 2015.
For those who don’t know him, Loro Makiqi is a popular and highly respected Albanian lawyer from the city of Ulcinj (Ulqin) in Montenegro. He was elected last year to the Council by a parliamentary vote.
Vesna Medenica is the chairwoman of the Supreme Court in Montenegro who claims a conflict of interest about Maliqi’s private work as an attorney. The irony is that Medenica herself is wearing two hats: she chairs the very Council which should be monitoring the work of the courts, including the country’s Supreme Court. It is in this council that the clash with Maliqi is taking place.

The issue of conflicts of interests is not to be taken lightly. The problem seems pervasive in the Western Balkans small republic, which is lobbying hard to join NATO and then the European Union.
A report from an ad-hoc commission found last April that at least “129 public officials have breached the law about the conflict of interest”, 76 of which in the state administration and 53 in the local ones. The juicy list included 4 ambassadors, 3 members of parliament, 4 vice-ministers and 8 school principals. Directors of boards and public companies particularly crowded the list. (http://www.konfliktinteresa.me/aktuelnosti/aktuelnosti.htm).
An old adage goes that the fish stinks from the head. For almost a quarter of century, Montenegro has known only one ruler, Milo Djukanovic. Whether he was President, Prime Minister or Chairman of his political party, Djukanovic has always had the last word in all the decisive political decisions in his country.
The long political career has made him and his friends very rich, while the country has suffered from an image of a heaven for dirty money and dubious Russian investors.
Thus to tackle the issue of “conflicts of interest” one has to start from the top, from where it is hurting this country the most.
As for the judiciary level, if a judge, especially a Supreme Court judge, can have a seat in the council of justice, then maybe a local attorney with a private practice can sit there as well. There is little reason to believe that this move against Markiqi is anything else than an act of ethnic discrimination. Suddenly even the token Albanian in the council is too much to accept. Offering this as an effort to fight the conflicts of interest in the state institutions is only adding insult to injury.
Let’s not forget that the representation of ethnic-Albanians in the public administration is too low for a country that claims to have no issues with ethnic and religious minorities. The ethnic Albanians make 5% of the population of Montenegro, but only 1.2% of the state employees are Albanians. Their presence in offices of the highest levels is almost zero.
The Albanians of Montenegro have seen this “Markiqi scenario” a bit too many times. This trend should to stop. Montenegro only stand to gain from increasing the number of Albanian professionals and experts in the state administration and institutions.

(Translated by Ruben Avxhiu)

(You can read the original in Albanian here: http://illyriapress.com/pse-kerkohet-largimi-i-te-vetmit-shqiptar-nga-keshilli-i-gjykates-se-malit-te-zi/)