Sacked Albanian Judge ‘Didn’t Get Fair Hearing’: Strasbourg Court

The European Court of Human Rights, ECHR ruled on Tuesday that Albanian had violated former Supreme Court judge Admir Thanza's right to a fair and impartial hearing when he was dismissed from his position after failing a vetting process.

However, the Strasbourg court found that his dismissal was not a violation of his rights under the European Convention on Human Rights.

Thanza went through the vetting process in 2018-19 and officials concluded that he failed the 'integrity test' because he had been convicted of theft in 1999 in Italy and had not declared it properly.

The vetting process, introduced in 2016 in an attempt to tackle corruption in Albania's judiciary, assesses judges and prosecutors using three criteria: the legality of their assets; their professional standing; their possible links to organised crime. In Thanza's case, problems were registered in all three areas.

But the ECHR said that he was not given "an adequate opportunity to defend himself as concerned his failure to disclose his contacts with organised-crime elements, and that the authorities' reasoning had been inadequate and too formalistic as concerned Mr Thanza's failure to declare previous criminal proceedings against himself".

In May 2019, Thanza was sentenced to nine months in prison for falsifying the declaration form, but the court decided to suspend the sentence and ordered Thanza to report to the Probation Service for 18 months and not have contact with inappropriate individuals during this period.

He had insisted that he was innocent.

In 2021, the Special Prosecution Against Corruption and Organised Crime, SPAK ordered the seizure of his apartment and a garage, under Albania's 'Anti-Mafia Law', which aims to tackle organised crime,...