Judiciary under spotlight

The project “Judiciary Under Spotlight” seeks to empower Albanian CSOs and
other key stakeholders to conduct monitoring and evaluation of the functioning of
the Albanian judiciary in compliance with legal, procedural and best practice
standards by endeavouring to achieve three outcomes (O):
O 1 – A Judicial Monitoring Framework developed and made available for use by
civil society actors.
O 2 – Increased and sustainable capacity of CSOs/key stakeholders to rigorously
monitor judicial activity.
O 3 – Monitoring exercise on judicial performance implemented in selected courts
and analytical reports published and discussed.
In order to achieve these outcomes, this project has undertaken to effectively train a
large number of organisations of civil society, including law students and media
organisations, from four big size regions of Albania (Tirana, Durresi, Vlora and
Shkodra) to carry out in a professional way monitoring processes on the
performance of the Albanian judiciary as per the applicable legal and procedural
framework as well as the best international standards. The training activity will aim
to transfer the indispensable know how on the contemporary standards, the
applicable Albanian legal/procedural framework and the monitoring tools (essential
indicators and data, and the methodology of their collection) on four key judicial
activity areas: (i) access to justice and fair trial, (ii) judicial meritocracy, (iii)
judicial integrity and (iv) court transparency. By the end of the training, which
amount to a crash professional course on these four areas, the targeted organisations
and actors of civil society will have obtained the required arsenal for conducting
their independent monitoring exercises of the judicial activity.
As an indispensable base and frame, under the first project objective “Develop a
Judicial Monitoring Framework and make available for use to civil society actors”,
4 guides and ten Training Manuals will be prepared before the start of the training
activity. The Manuals will provide all necessary essentials of standards, legal
references, judicial practices and relevant monitoring tools on the four targeted
areas of judicial activity (see further above) in such a way as to effectively enable
the organisations/actors of civil society to carry out their own independent
monitoring exercises. Further on, under Objective Two of the project “Increase the
capacity of CSOs/key stakeholders to rigorously monitor judicial activity” about sixty (60) Albanian CSOs, including youth and media organisations, in addition to
law students of main universities from Tirana, Durres, Shkoder and Vlore, will
successfully undergo training in the targeted four areas of judicial activity and ways
to develop a judicial sector benchmark monitoring/evaluation project.
Under the sub-granting scheme four selected courts from the four selected
regions that will be subject to monitoring exercises by trained CSOs under the
project constitute the indirect beneficiaries.