Below is part of the reasoning behind the President's decree setting the date for the elections for the Municipality of Tirana, while the mayor has filed an appeal with the Constitutional Court, according to Article 115 of the Constitution.
The President reasons:
“The decision of the Council of Ministers dismissing the mayor of a municipality ‘for serious violations of the Constitution or laws’ shall be suspended, in the event that an appeal is filed against it with the Constitutional Court. Any other decision dismissing the mayor of a municipality on the grounds that the latter is ‘convicted of committing a criminal offense, by a final decision of the court’ or that he is ‘proposed for dismissal by the relevant municipal council for failure to appear for duty for an uninterrupted period of 3 months’, unless appealed to the Administrative Court (not the Constitutional Court), shall be suspended only if the suspension is specifically ordered by the Administrative Court.”
But if we accept this reasoning for a moment, it turns out that the President's constitutional error is even deeper. With this logic, the President admits that for Veliaj's dismissal, the appeal must be filed with the Administrative Court. Then the question arises: what is the deadline for appealing a VKM for dismissal or a decision of the Municipal Council proposing dismissal?
Shouldn't the President have waited for this deadline to expire and, only if there was no appeal, decree elections?
The Law on the Administrative Court is clear: Article 18 provides that, depending on the administrative act, the deadline for filing an appeal is a minimum of 45 days, while for some other acts it goes up to 1 year.
So, even assuming the President's logic is correct, he should have waited at least 45 days, verified whether an appeal had been filed, and seen if the court would issue a stay. Only after that could he decree the elections.
This is the inevitable conclusion of the legal reasoning that the President himself claims to follow – a conclusion that highlights even more clearly his constitutional violation.
