Albania

The President of the European Council said on Friday the bloc will be holding intensive discussions in coming weeks on how future enlargement should be managed.

Charles Michel, who was in the Albanian capital, Tirana, to meet with Prime Minister Edi Rama, said all member countries "are unanimous on one point — that the Western Balkans' future should be toward Europe."

Prosecutors in Albania summoned a mayor for questioning on Thursday over a video filmed by a security camera from above, showing someone apparently snorting cocaine.

Albania became the target of Iranian ire when it started hosting the MEK, a cult-like organisation and one of the bitterest adversaries of the Iranian regime. In 2013,

For the first time, however, the IMO observer assigned to the case - Italian judge Ferdinando Buatier de Mongeot - objected, and asked that his dissenting opinion be published alongside the Chamber's decision.

Huddled in conference, the Chamber's judges voted 6-1 against the request, according to documents obtained by BIRN via a freedom of information request.

Pressure is growing on the Albanian government over its "anti-defamation" laws, after the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, CoE, said it had asked its advisory body, the Venice Commission, for its opinion.

AGERPRES special correspondent Florentina Peia reports reports: Romania's President Klaus Iohannis participates today in the Fifth World Holocaust Forum dedicated Holocaust remembrance, which takes place at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

Both declined from last year, when Bosnia was ranked in 89th place, with 38 points, and North Macedonia came in 93rd place, with 37 points.

Bosnia shares its 106th place with Albania, which also declined in the rankings. It came in 99th place last year.

The report, Fighting Words: Journalism Under Assault in Central and Eastern Europe, issued on Wednesday by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and the University of Oxford evaluates the situation of the media in the region by drawing on interviews with about a hundred journalists in 16 countries during 2019.

On January 1, 2020 Romania took over the chairmanship-in-office of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation Organisation (BSEC), with the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Romania (CCIR) taking over the chairmanship-in-office of the BSEC Business Council for six months.

The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg said on Tuesday that it had found in favour of Arben Strazimiri, who was detained in a prison hospital because Albania does not have specialist healthcare institutions for people who have been ordered to undergo compulsory treatment for mental illness.