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All Fatmir Xhafaj's people, but Ulsi Manja's fault

2025-08-03 15:35:00, Editorial CNA

All Fatmir Xhafaj's people, but Ulsi Manja's fault

The accusations against the minister who introduced the initiative regarding the wording of the draft of the new Criminal Code should be analyzed from another perspective.

When everyone seems to be running after Berihai, finding articles here and there and wondering where the authors copied them from, public opinion would benefit from clarification on some issues.

First, the lawyers who worked on the draft were not selected by the minister who is accusing some exponents of being handpicked today, just as the lawyers who are said to have worked on the draft were also selected.

The working group that Ulsi Manja has found working on the new Criminal Code is this:

- group leader Arben Rakipi, director of the School of Magistrates;

- Criminal Law lecturer, Skënder Kaçupi;

- Supreme Court judge, Sokol Binaj;

- Judge of the Special Appeals Court, Tereza Merkaj;

- Judge of the Special First Instance, Erjon Bani;

- Judge of the Court of Tirana, Gerd Hoxha.

 and prosecutors :

- Kujtim Luli,

-Arqile Koca,

-Ylli Pjetërnika,

-Andi Pogaçe.

All Fatmir Xhafaj's people, but Ulsi Manja's fault
Order for the establishment of the working group
All Fatmir Xhafaj's people, but Ulsi Manja's fault
Order for the establishment of the working group
All Fatmir Xhafaj's people, but Ulsi Manja's fault
Order for the establishment of the working group

 

This group was composed and asked to contribute to a draft Criminal Code, since 2019, when not Ulsi Manja, but Etilda Gjonaj was Minister of Justice.

Etilda Gjonaj was Minister of Justice in the period 2017-2021.

Upon arriving at the Ministry of Justice, Ulsi Manja simply formalized a group that had been working for a long time.

The group appears to have worked until mid-2023, when the draft was submitted to Manja and remained shelved for almost two years.

This draft was made public on July 25, 2025, and here there are questions about the time that Minister Manja found to release it for public discussion. In the last months of the mandate, when September awaits the formation of the cabinet, this seems to be the most inappropriate time to release a draft of a Criminal Code.

But the positions of the heads of justice institutions are somewhat more meaningless.

Sokol Sadushi, stated during a conference that neither he nor the legal community were familiar with the final version of the project.

Sokol Sadushi cannot speak on behalf of the legal community from the chair he holds, although public opinion is filled with debate about the unjustified power from the position that Sadushi has secured through the justice reform. As for the position he holds officially and not under the rug, the High Court has been represented by one of the judges of that court, who has not decided himself, but Sokol Sadushi himself has followed him as a representative of the High Court.

The same can be said for the Court of First Instance, the Special Court, as well as the General Prosecutor's Office and the prosecutor's office at SPAK.

 

But why did everyone run to hide from the draft published on the official website of the Ministry of Justice?

Why was the attack against Manja organized when the list of experts has the stamp of Fatmir Xhafaj?

The head of the Technical Secretariat of the working group was the head of the Criminal Law sector in the Directorate of Codification and Harmonization of Legislation, former prosecutor Bledar Mustafaraj.

After leaving the justice system, in June 2024, Mustafaraj was appointed director of the Legal Directorate at the Supreme State Audit Office.

After this, he was seen returning to the public scene as a high-level expert in the "anti-corruption" commission headed by MP Fatmir Xhafaj.

There are no official documents regarding Mustafaraj's recruitment process for the expert position, nor the procedure followed for the selection and verification of experts.

But it is a well-known fact that Fatmir Xhafaj selects "independent experts" who never exhaust them.

If you look at the list of people engaged in drafting the New Criminal Code, they are either people clearly identified as close to Fatmir Xhafaj, or as people with an affinity and close to Berisha.

That is, all the people in the draft are Fatmir and Berisha's, but Ulsi Manja made the Code badly!

The Attorney General, who believed he had washed his hands of the draft, was represented in the group by Kujtim Luli. Kujtim Luli is no longer a magistrate today, as he was excluded from vetting in 2023, but not before the draft was submitted to the minister.

The Prosecutor General himself says that in mid-2023 we forwarded the comments for the general part, that is, when Kujtin Luli was still a prosecutor.

Every day it becomes more and more clear that the entire debate has only one goal that seems to be no longer being hidden.

The opposition must now decide what it wants : does it want the "Xhafa" Commission, which seeks to come up with recommendations to reform criminal policy and the repressive acts with political tendencies that have appeared, where SPAK prosecutors do not start from the cases, but start from the names and find the problems, or does it want this new Ulsi Criminal Code.

Berisha has not spoken yet, but to stir things up, he brought out Albana./ CNA





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