MJAFT! Concerned About Firings in the Administration

Mjaft

04 May 2006

The MJAFT! Movement has brought up in public the various violations registered in the firings in the public administration since the Government of PM Berisha took the office. According to this MJAFT!, this �cleansing� has affected mostly employees with the status of civil servant, otherwise protected by the Law. MJAFT! also expressed its concern about the lack of transparency of this process and the failure of the Government to observe the decisions of the judiciary on this matter.

Anisa Kaltanji, activist of MJAFT! said for the media that �after July 3, the new policy of the Berisha government had in focus the so-called �restructuring� of the administration, but this �restructuring� lead to the horizontal reduction of 2000 jobs in the central administration�. She did not call this �restructuring�, but �massive firings�.

According to MJAFT! the government has acted surprisingly quickly in this process and has not paid much attention to observance of the Law. Kaltanji explained during the press conference that the decisions of the government in this direction contradict the article 23, point 2 and article 24 of the law 8459, on the status of the civil employee and some previous decisions of the Council of Ministers.

This initiative of the MJAFT Movement came after the report of the Civil Service Commission on the administration firings was presented in the Parliament, which noticed some violations. Therefore, MJAFT - after many complaints presented in the office of the Ombudsman and in the Court � requested from each Ministry, according to the law �On the Right or Information on the Official Documents� a report on the process of firing and hiring during September 2005 � February 2006.

�40 days later (the time defined by the law on the right of information) we received only 6 reports from 6 ministries, while 8 other ministries did not respond to our legal request, which constitutes a violation of the law on the right of information, as well as of the promise made by the government on the institutional transparency�, declared Kaltanji.

She also confirmed that the number of complaints in KSHC of the employees fired has gone up to 6000. �This is a clear sign of a cleansing of the administration employees, in whose professionalism the Albanian state and the international community has invested for qualification in the country and abroad�, Kaltanji said further.

Esmeralda Kodheli, ex-specialists in the Department of the Cultural Heritage in the Ministry of Tourism, Culture, Youth and Sports, was also present in the press conference. She spoke in front of the media about her personal experience. She said that after the new government was created, the restructuring presented in the Ministry, with the order of the Prime Minister Berisha, did not affect or change the Department of the Cultural Heritage. �However, only 3 weeks later, on 14th of November, they fired me under the pretext of �restructuring��, declared Kodheli.