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Edi Rama also seems to have been inspired by Erdogan's "democracy", whose parliamentary majority, like nowhere else in the 21st century, has decided to introduce into the Criminal Code a penalty of up to four years in prison for those who insult the main institutions of the state.
It is rare for democratic countries to have laws on lèse-majesté, which punish those who insult the highest state authority. These laws, which even where they exist no longer punish anyone, are remnants of the time of feudal monarchies where the king was not only the embodiment of the state, but also the bearer of power by divine will.
Countries that strongly condemn "crimes" such as insulting high state authorities are not distinguished as democracies. An example here is Turkey. In today's Turkey, if you insult the President of the Republic, you are sentenced to up to 6 years in prison. And unlike what happens elsewhere, for example, in Italy, President Napolitano himself immediately pardoned Umberto Bossi who was convicted after calling him a "terrone", in Turkey this is applied harshly. Around 14,000 people, including journalists, comedians and opposition politicians, have been sentenced to prison for insulting the President of the Republic.
Edi Rama also seems to have been inspired by Erdogan's "democracy", whose parliamentary majority, like nowhere else in the 21st century, has decided to introduce into the Criminal Code a penalty of up to four years in prison for those who insult the main institutions of the state. Not only for insulting the head of state, but also the government, parliament, the armed forces and the Constitutional Court.
On the other side of the barricade are countries where the freedom to mock, insult and despise public authorities and institutions is absolute. First and foremost, the United States of America. Since 1791, the first amendment to the constitution has obliged Congress to “make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...” This way of wording has sparked debates about whether and in what cases the right to speech can be limited. Over time, the interpretation that considered freedom of speech almost absolute prevailed.
One of the most significant cases of testing freedom of speech has been the relationship with the US flag. During the strong protests against the American intervention in Vietnam, some protesters went so far as to oppose their country by violating the national flag. These acts prompted Congress to pass a special law in 1968 against the desecration (violation, insult, burning, etc.) of the flag. However, this law did not remain unchallenged. In 1984, an American citizen named Gregory Lee Johnson decided to burn the American flag in Texas during the American National Convention. For this act, he was arrested, sentenced to a year in prison, and fined $2,000.
The case ended up in the Supreme Court. In two decisions in 1989 and 1990, the Court considered flag burning to be a symbolic gesture, and therefore part of the freedom of expression guaranteed by the First Amendment of the Constitution, striking down the 1968 law against flag desecration as unconstitutional. The majority of the judges argued that the public outrage and indignation at flag desecration was not enough to justify a ban on freedom of expression. One of the judges who voted in favor of the right to burn the flag, conservative Antonin Scalia, said that if it were up to him, he would put hippies who burn the American flag in prison. But he is not a king who can do whatever he wants and must enforce the Constitution.
This radical interpretation of freedom of speech in American jurisprudence is deeply rooted in the tradition of liberal political thought. One of the most prominent liberal thinkers of the 19th century, John Stuart Mill, in his book “On Liberty,” strongly defends the almost absolute freedom of expression by citizens. Even when they are wrong, even when words can emotionally affect the vast majority of society, the individual has the right to express himself as he pleases. The only restriction that Mill imposed was the principle of causing harm, which means that speech can be limited only when it directly and inevitably incites physical attack on another person. This depends not on the content of the message, but on the context. For example, a person has the right to write in a newspaper that the speculation of grain merchants is causing the people to starve. He has no right to deliver the same message to a confused crowd passing in front of a grain merchant's house, because in doing so he is directly and inevitably inciting them to lynching the merchant.
In Western countries, freedom of expression has its roots in the Protestant Reformation, when the right to believe without consulting clerical authorities was grudgingly won. This right, initially expressed as freedom of belief and conscience, was a key theme in treatises on political philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries. In its fullness as freedom of expression and conscience, it has advanced considerably during the 19th and 20th centuries, although in recent decades there has been much debate about what its limits might be when certain social communities are insulted or humiliated.
However, the people of countries with a democratic tradition have long earned the right to verbally attack public institutions and their leaders, to mock and humiliate them with words while performing their duties. This right – which in the USA goes to the extreme of burning the flag or the freedom to call for an uprising (it is enough not to practically organize for an uprising) – is an indicator of the strength of society against power, but also of the maturity of democracy which, as the American philosopher John Rawls says, through the tolerance of subversive ideas measures the pulse of society and the distance between the latter and the institutions.
Now compare the breadth of freedom of expression in democratic countries, along with the historical and philosophical baggage of this right over the centuries, with the new Penal Code that Edi Rama's party plans to adopt in Albania. According to it, not only the flag is protected from desecration (as is the case in most democratic countries, although not in the US and the so-called Anglo-Saxon countries), but also institutions and, consequently, their leaders and members. Desecration is defined, among other things, as mockery or contempt.
So if we say "government of thieves", "parliament of beasts", "puppet president", or make fun of the nonsense that Edi Rama and the Speaker of the Parliament utter (remember the comparison she made of Rama with Skanderbeg!), we risk up to 3 years in prison. The same number of years is the risk for any comedian who has the courage to mock the President of the Republic or the Chief of the General Staff of the Army. If the mockery and contempt are committed during public holidays and official ceremonies, then the sentence goes up to 4 years in prison. That's how many years in prison a group of students will face tomorrow, for example, who, during an official ceremony where Edi Rama is present, will unfurl a banner calling him a thief or a destroyer of higher education.
They say that according to Article 22 of the Constitution of the Republic of Albania, “freedom of expression is guaranteed.” They are making it up in vain. In our fortunate country, the will of the Leader is above the constitution. The Germans called it the Führerprinzip in the years 1933-1945.
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