“Ten years of captured state have led to a situation in which every citizen, regardless of whether being involved in the social and political life or not, was expecting much more. What I can say from my perspective is that indeed much work was put in every segment. Huge results could not be expected, nor was it objective to expect such results for one year. It is important to me that the process has begun, the fear that was present among the citizens kept getting smaller with their active participation…the citizens began not only to criticize the previous government, but to also criticize the current government”, stated Margarita Caca Nikolovska, a judge of the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina and former judge in the European Court of Human Rights in a conversation with CIVIL Media for Perspectives 2019.
Nikolovska considers that if we speak about specific steps of the current government of last year, then many laws were adopted, but there was constant wandering in the drafting of the laws. Nevertheless, she adds that achieving the two agreements with Bulgaria and Greece is a courageous move that should result with Macedonia entering NATO and EU.
The judiciary was criticized for 2018 by our interlocutor. As an expert in that field, Nikolovska considers that, aside from the adopted laws related to the judiciary, that the very work of the judges did not experience any changes that were expected.
“I cannot understand how a captured state without any changes in the judiciary itself will uncapture itself. Perhaps at some point of time it will seem that something is happening, but the general picture of the judiciary is even worse than before. The state has to do something in order to show that it is fighting the judiciary, with the segment that reflects the negativity and contributes to not having trust in the judiciary”, stated Nikolovska.
For 2019, Margarita Caca Nikolovska expects that trust in the judiciary will increase, that there will be many more activities in this direction, that laws of better quality will be adopted and that there will be better quality thinking in the direction of what is being offered, that is, debates, quality and argumentative ones.
“The focus should be directed to the responsibility of all those segments that participated in the process for which we received the assessment of being a captured state. We have a situation in which, due to passiveness, for only the state public prosecutor to be dismissed. We do not have a situation of repairing the consequences because of such behaviour of certain individuals…”, considers Nikolovska.
Biljana Jordanovska
Camera: Dehran Muratov
