In Albania, US Ambassador Yuri Kim said today that the rule of law must prevail and that no one can be above the law. She made these comments to journalists in Vlora, while being asked about the situation regarding the decision of the US State Department against former Prime Minister Sali Berisha. The latter stated the day before that he would file a lawsuit against US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in front of a French court, but legal experts raise doubts about its jurisdiction over such a case.
Situated in Vlora together with the Albanian Minister of Defense Niko Peleshi, to attend the great American exercise Defender 21, the American ambassador Yuri Kim, could not avoid the questions on the topic that has dominated the public opinion in Albania for the last three days, the decision of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to ban former Albanian President and former Prime Minister Sali Berisha from entering the United States, due to high-level corruption.
Ms Kim said she had nothing to add to what the Secretary of State himself had said. But she responded to the journalists’ insistence by saying that “the message is that Albania is changing, it is a member of NATO, it will be a member of the EU. Albania is an ally and friend of the United States. The rule of law must prevail. It should be a clean place and a rich place. To get there, no one can be above the law. “The days of impunity must come to an end.”
The day before, former Prime Minister Sali Berisha announced that he had decided to open a lawsuit for “defamation” against US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, because for reasons that are completely unknown to me, the Secretary of State has published yesterday, without any warning and in the most unexpected, slanderous way, false assessments of my personality “.
A State Department spokeswoman told VOA yesterday that “they are not aware of any lawsuits,” while today, Ambassador Kim was almost indifferent to such an issue when she told reporters that ” “I have no idea what you are talking about.”
Mr. Berisha explained that he has hired one of the well-known French lawyers Battonier Jean Yves Leborgne and that the lawsuit will be filed before the Correctional Court of Paris, for public defamation.
In the French justice system, the Correctional Court is simply one of the three chambers which make up the Court of First Instance. As such it remains unclear what clauses could be used to open a process where neither party, neither the plaintiff nor the defendant, are French citizens, and when no element of the case relates to France.
Even American international law expert Paul Williams, a professor at the Faculty of Law at the American University in Washington, told VOA that “Secretary of State Tony Blinken enjoys immunity from official action. In the United States, the courts do not interfere in foreign policy. “I do not know what the French courts would say, except that this is a dispute between a non-citizen and a foreign state, so they would not have jurisdiction over such a matter,” Mr Williams said.VOA
