Court Organization and Court Administrators' Capacities in Albania

Within the framework of the joint European Union and the Council of Europe programme "Support to Efficiency of Justice - SEJ" in Albania, the Council of Europe has assigned the task of assessing the current situation with regards to Court organisation and administrators' capacities (judicial and non-judicial staff), their functions and responsibilities to a team of experts. The focus, in particular, is to first instance and appeal courts. This is an exploratory study. The time constraints and the complexity of the topic did not allow us to analyze more in-depth the interesting issues at stake. However, the study offers a quite rich overview of the Court Organisation and Court Administrators' capacities in Albania and provides a number of insights and observation which can be useful to stimulate actions, discussions and further investigation by the stakeholders but also within the courts. The assessment is based on documentation already collected by the SEJ, a preliminary questionnaire developed to guide the data collection, a fact-finding mission carried out by the experts team (Marco Velicogna, Davide Carnevali, and Anduena Gjevori) with the support of the SEJ staff, additional visits carried out by the team national expert (Anduena Gjevori), and additional material and documentation collected by the team both during the visits both afterwards. The analysis of the Albanian situation shows that there are several areas for possible improvement. At the same time, organizational and administrators capacity-building initiatives must be balanced with the respect of key judicial values. An overview of court organization and management principle and judicial values has been introduced in Chapter 2. These values must be declined with the specific needs and requirement of the Albanian Justice System. This concluding chapter provides, therefore, some indications on how to address the main challenges in light of 1) present organization, legal framework and working practices, 2) international principles and 3) other justice systems examples which could be adapted in this specific context.