The mafia passports scandal speaks very poorly about Macedonia and shows that we placed ourselves as protectors of international, high level organized crime and allowed criminals to move freely in pursuit of their activities, Sladjana Taseva, from the Macedonian branch of the Transparency International corruption watchdog. The Interior Ministry was recently revealed in the act of issuing passports to high level criminals from around the region and even the world.

The scandal can’t be reduced to just seven low level clerks, people tasked simply with snapping pictures and issuing passports. They could not have acted alone in this, Taseva said.

She added that she is not satisfied with the level of reforms in the judiciary and the rule of law. “After the Colored Revolution, after the declarations of ‘no justice, no peace’, I expected that there will be prepared solutions in the area of judiciary and they will be implemented immediately. Today we see that only surface level reforms were done, and there was no deeper action in the judiciary”, Taseva added in an interview with Infomax.