The data provided by a BIRN study shows that 154 judges out of 268 in total have problems in justifying property with declared resources, while the unjustified sum reaches the value of ALL 698 million in total.
About 57 percent of first instance judges in Albania fail to test the property's justification for at least one year of disclosure, reveals a BIRN study based on the practice of arithmetic and logical control of property declarations.
The study notes that 154 judges out of 268 in total have unjustified differences in their declared assets.The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN, analyzed family property declarations of 268 judges of district courts and administering the information by the High Inspectorate of Declaration and Audit of Assets (ILDKPKI), through a request for information.
First instance judges account for about 65% of all judges' corps and are distributed to 23 court district in Albania.
The analysis included 3128 total property declarations, which belong to the declaration years 2003-2016. After being thrown into a database, statements were subjected to arithmetic and logical analysis - one of the control forms that ILDKPKI uses to investigate the wealth of senior officials.
The data obtained shows that only 114 judges out of 268 total manage to cover with declared resources their wealth over 13 years. While the other 154 judges appear to have unjustified increases in wealth for one or more years of their career.
Unjustified differences account for about 17 percent of total net wealth that first-instance judges possess.
The most problematic court in the justification of wealth resulted that of Saranda, where 27.7 percent of the analyzed statements have unjustified differences wealth. In the second place, the Court of Debar is ranked with 20 percent of the statements and in the third place that of Pogradec with 18 percent of unsatisfied statements.
Failure of judges to test the justification of wealth with declared financial resources is a widespread phenomenon in the Albanian justice system. From previous asset declaration statements, BIRN concluded that unjustified wealth differences is found in 58 per cent of Supreme Court members, in 77 per cent of members of the Constitutional Court, and in 79 per cent of members of the Albanian Appeal Courts.