In Tirana, the Council for Legislation decided today to ask the Speaker of the Assembly to include in the agenda of the next plenary session the motion on the incompatibility of the mandate of Socialist MP Olta Xhaçka.
The decision was taken unanimously by the majority and the opposition at the meeting, where the decision of the Constitutional Court was reviewed, which dismissed as incompatible with the Constitution the decision of the Assembly for not sending this motion to the Constitutional Court.
The decision of July 10 expressly obliges the Assembly to send to the Constitutional Court the motion on the incompatibility of the mandate of deputy Xhaçka, as the only body charged by the Constitution, to judge this issue and to ascertain the incompatibility.
The motion on the mandate of Mrs. Xhaçka is expected to pass again in the plenary session of the Assembly on September 12, before arriving at the Constitutional Court for judgment.
This is the third time that the issue of Ms. Xhaçka's mandate goes to a plenary session, after two other times the Assembly with a socialist majority decided not to send her to the Constitutional Court.
With the decision of July 10, the Constitutional Court annulled and declared as incompatible with the Constitution the decision of April 11 of the Assembly for not sending the motion on the mandate of Mrs. Xhaçka to the Constitutional Court.
Socialist deputies approved the passage of this motion in the next plenary session, “pursuant to the decision of the Constitutional Court”as expressed by their representatives in the legislation council.
“Given that in its decision the Constitutional Court has ordered the Assembly (the plenary session, which takes decisions) to send the relevant motion to the Constitutional Court, this legislation council should propose to the President of the Assembly to include this draft decision in the order of the day of the nearest session”, among other things, the socialist deputy, Klotilda Bushka, said at the meeting.
On June 20, two years ago, a group of opposition MPs addressed to the Assembly a motion to declare the invalidity and end of the mandate of the Socialist MP Olta Xhaçka, with the claim that she, contrary to the Constitution, has benefited from property rights from state property through commercial company owned by her husband.
A few days later, another group of opposition MPs submitted a similar motion. The motions were combined in a review by the Council of Mandates and the Assembly with a socialist majority overruled the opposition report and adopted its own report in November 2022, according to which the constitutional criteria to set the Constitutional Court in motion were not met and did not refer the case to the Constitutional Court .
The next day, the opposition turned to this court to resolve the dispute and the conflict of powers between it and the Assembly, and in the decision of January 2023, the Court assessed that the Assembly should bring the case to the Constitutional Court for judgment.
But after a review with an expert and a series of meetings from March 2023 to April 2024, it was decided that the matter should be passed to the plenary session, where it was again decided by a majority of votes not to send the motion to the Court for the incompatibility of the mandate of deputy Olta Xhaçka .
The Constitutional Court declared this decision incompatible with the Constitution and the Obligation of the Assembly of Albania for sending to the Constitutional Court the motion for the incompatibility of the mandate of MP Olta Xhaçka.
“I am very pleased that you have changed your attitude today. You declared independence from the decisions of the Constitutional Court. Even after the publication of the Court's decision, the previous position of your parliamentary group was that 'the Constitutional Court says whatever it wants, we will do whatever we want'”. said opposition deputy Gazment Bardhi, chairman of the DP parliamentary group.
The opposition demanded the incompatibility and the end of the mandate of MP Xhaçka two years ago, when she called it a conflict of interest the fact that her husband's company, former MP Artan Gaçi, received the status of a strategic investor to build a tourist hotel in the south of the country.
The Special Court against Corruption and Organized Crime seized over 10,000 square meters of the area on which the hotel is planned to be built.
The land purchased by Mr. Gaçi from private persons turns out to have benefited from the latter through the falsification of documents, while the surface was owned by the state.
The former mayor of Himara, Jorgo Goro, was arrested for suspicions about the ownership of this piece of land.
