Ombudsman: European Integration Is Measured By The Distance Between The Law On Letter And The Law In Practice
Five dead in Albanian prisons between the end of January and the beginning of April, at least two from cardiac arrest. With this picture, the Ombudsman, Mr. Endrit Shabani, opened his speech today at the National Council for European Integration.
"The distance between the protocol on paper and the treatment in practice is being measured in lives lost", stressed Mr. Shabani. According to him, the Interim Standards Assessment Report (IBAR) will not measure the number of open chapters, but the degree to which the reforms are felt by the Albanian citizen.
"We have a law against discrimination that is well read in Brussels, European integration begins when an Egyptian child has no obstacles to enrolling in kindergarten, or when a woman is treated the same as any other citizen in a health center," said the Ombudsman.
The same logic was illustrated with the current property compensation scheme, where the former owner receives no less than 10 percent of the current cadastral value.
Mr. Shabani put forward two concrete proposals: first, a dedicated budget increase from the Assembly for the prison and detention system; second, a legal obligation for public institutions to report on the level of implementation of the recommendations of independent institutions.
"We in the independent institutions are the ones who receive complaints when political parties are busy dealing with each other", the Ombudsman underlined.
"This position makes us useful for the European process, because we see problems with the aim of solving them, not using them, and not hiding them", concluded Shabani.