PART I: HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

On 4 March 1966, the Central Committee (CC) of the Albanian Party of Labor (APL) addressed all communists, workers and military personnel in Albania through an open letter in which it condemned in the harshest terms possible the phenomenon of bureaucratisation in both state and party apparatuses. Describing bureaucratisation as a ‘remnant of the past and an expression of the pressure exerted by the class enemy and his ideology on our ranks’, the CC also denounced the excessive formality and ‘officialism’ that characterised the work of state institutions, their separation from the masses, the inflated public administration, the intelligentsia’s contempt for physical labour, their tendency to seek personal comfort and personal glory, and so on. The CC’s open letter marked the official start of the anti-bureaucratisation campaign in Albania, a campaign that brought about significant changes in the organisation and functioning of the entire justice system, while also leading to a reconfiguration of the relationship between the masses and the law in general. For instance, in the aforementioned open letter the CC calls on the masses not to leave the formulation of laws exclusively in the hands of bureaucrats and technocrats, but rather to become actively involved in this activity ‘by expressing their opinions and presenting their criticisms’, so that the ‘bureaucratic distortions’ and ‘unnecessary excesses’ (the example given in the letter is ‘the obsession with anticipating all possible scenarios’) that made laws incomprehensible or difficult to understand for the working masses could thereby be avoided (Komiteti Qendror 1966: 1).

On 1 November 1966, almost exactly eight months after the Central Committee’s open letter, Enver Hoxha, the First Secretary of the APL, discussed the anti-bureaucratisation campaign and the pursuit of the mass line by the party and state apparatuses at length in his report to the Fifth Party Congress. Hoxha’s speech is notable for two reasons as far as the anti-bureaucratisation campaign and the pursuit of the mass line are concerned. The first reason has to do with the fact that in his discussion of bureaucratisation Hoxha singled out the work of the prosecution and the courts (which the CC had refrained from doing in its open letter) and heavily admonished them for their ‘severe weaknesses’ (Hoxha 1966: 10).