In his Kurir.mk interview, VMRO-DPMNE President Hristijan Mickoski says that the judiciary in Macedonia is under the full control of the now outgoing Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, and it will require major reforms to be made fully independent.
We will need thorough reforms, we can’t have the Prime Minister continue to be the person who decides how the judges get to work. We need to release the judiciary from the clutches of the politicians and get them to work in accordance with the laws and the Constitution. We will have justice for all the injustices and violations of the past, there will absolutely be accountability. We saw many cases in this past period which were politically driven and we will have to investigate the judges and prosecutors who violated the law and worked under political orders. Those who remained immune will be rewarded, Mickoski told Kurir.
According to the VMRO leader, Zaev relies on the control over the judiciary to remain in power, and this is the reason why he pushed so strongly to make Katica Janeva’s position as Special Prosecutor permanent. This political pressure, Mickoski says, is the main systemic problem and it will not be resolved with solutions such as the proposed vetting of judges and prosecutors.
Janeva obviously knows too much so Zaev is moving fast to release her from detention, selling us sob stories how she is now unemployed, as opposed to the time when she was overpaid and was collecting thousands of euros from the public coffers. We called for an investigation into the finances of the Special Prosecutor’s Office from the start. Now that the institution is collapsing others are joining in. But the problem is not in the existence of prosecutors like Vilma Ruskoska or Katica Janeva, but in the fact that we have a Prime Minister like Zoran Zaev, who is exerting brutal pressure on the judges and prosecutors. No judiciary can withstand the pressures of a Prime Minister who is using them to advance his political interests, Mickoski said.
According to the opposition leader, the current feud between organized crime prosecutor Ruskoska and the Skopje Appeals Court over Katica Janeva looks clearly staged, in an attempt to shift the blame for Janeva’s release away from Zaev’s regime.
Mickoski insists that the actual blame rests with Zaev, who is blocking the case against SDSM party officials who were extorting money together with Katica Janeva, who allowed the killer of Martin Neskovski to flee the country and influenced dozens of other criminal cases.
Comments are closed for this post.