CPII launches the Monitoring Report: “Transparency of State Publications in Albania, 2009”

Report on Transparency of State Publications is presented to the Albanian Public and the State Institutions for the second year in succession. This Monitoring Report, 2009 was compiled by the Center for Public Information Issues, CPII, due to the significant support offered by National Endowment for Democracy, NED, with its Headquarters in D.C. and funded by the US Congress. The Report on the Transparency of State Publications, 2009, has encompassed in its monitoring focus the entire spectrum of Albanian Central State Institutions with regard to their acts’ publication in the Official Gazette. For the first time, this report provides a comprehensive overview of the situation related to publication of official acts for the institutions comprising the three constitutional powers: Legislative, Executive and Judicial branch. (On the preceding report, supported by OSFA, the monitoring was focused only on the publication of laws issued by the Assembly and by-laws issued by the Council of Ministers, from 2006 to 2008. Thanks to NED’s support, in the current Monitoring Report, CPII has also completed the missing data for the remaining institutions during the period 2006-2008.)

In the framework of Report on the Transparency of State Publications, 2009, CPII has also monitored the consistency of publication in the Official Gazette of the Decisions of the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Albania, which has a special jurisdiction, aiming the surveillance of the constitutionality of laws and other normative acts.

In adition to that, for the very first time, CPII has included in this Monitoring Report the publication in the Official Gazette of the Decisions of the European Court on Human Rights. Publication of the complete version of final, as well as other decisions of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), with the Albanian State as the accused party, is an approach that is being applied by Albania in the framework of the Recommendation (2002) 13 of EC Committee of Ministers. It is worth highlighting that, as implied by the term “Recommendation” itself, the publication of the decisions of the ECHR is not a legal obligations derived by the internal legislative system of the Republic of Albania.

This monitoring author would rather prefer to consider it as an auditing report on state publications system in the Republic of Albania. The natural target of this report is the State Publications Center (SPC), without excluding all other central institutions whose acts are subject of publication in the Official Gazette

All un-published acts identified and included this monitoring report are “submitted” to SPC to be published in Extra Official Gazette (special editions issued when un-published acts are identified on the process), once the relevant verifications for reliability are undertaken. We hope that this report compiled by CPII, supported by NED, will be considered as an independent contribution which complements the efforts made by SPC since two years now to reduce “the stock” of acts that have been left out of publication in the OG since year 2000 to present.