Ethnic Greek Politician Fredi Beleri Released from Albanian Prison
Source: Balkan Insight
Fredi Beleri in Athens on May 8, 2023. Photo: Facebook/Fredi Beleri.
The jailed former mayor of the Albanian municipality of Himara, Fredi Beleri, whose case caused a rift in Tirana-Athens relations, was given conditional release from prison on Monday, his lawyer Eugen Gjyzari confirmed to BIRN.
The main condition was that Beleri, who is now a member of the European Parliament, “must keep five weeks of contact with the prison service”, Gjyzari explained. He added that Beleri had six weeks to go until he completed his sentence.
An ethnic Greek, Beleri was jailed in May 2023 and convicted by a final court decision in June this year.
After the court ruling, Beleri wrote in his Facebook page that he would “take his case to the European Court of Human Rights”.
“My battle begins now. It goes without saying that I will complain to the European Court of Human Rights about what the Albanian regime denied me in a coup d’etat,” he added.
Pavlos Marinakis, a Greek minister, on Monday said Beleri’s release was “definitely a positive development; however this does not mean that we will forget what happened; in Fredi Beleri the Greek government and the Greek minority in Albania has a representative in the European Parliament who will speak about its rights”.
Beleri won a seat in the European Parliament this year despite being in jail. Albanian authorities allowed him to leave prison in July to travel to Strasbourg to be sworn in as a member of the parliament.
Beleri, 52, was elected mayor of Himara on Albania’s southern coast in local elections in May 2023. He was arrested two days before polling day on charges of vote-buying. He claims the case against him was manufactured by the Albanian police on political orders. Albania’s government claims it has nothing to do with his arrest and jailing.
Albania’s Special Court Against Corruption and Organised Crime sentenced him to two years in prison in March this year. The Court of Appeals on June 25 upheld the conviction, potentially barring him from Albanian political life for two decades. The Albanian Central Elections Commission on July 5 removed his mandate.
The Beleri case caused a diplomatic dispute with Greece, which threatened to block Albania’s EU accession progress if Tirana did not respect the politician’s rights, which Athens claimed were being violated.
Greece’s centre-right ruling New Democracy party ran Beleri as a candidate in the European elections in May. Despite being in prison in Albania, he won some 237,925 votes in Greece. Although he wasn’t able to canvas, he came fourth on the candidate list of New Democracy in terms of the number of votes he got.
New elections were held in Himara on August 4, which were won by the candidate from the ruling Socialist Party of Prime Minister Edi Rama.
The original article: Balkan Insight .
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