Lost in Translation: Does North Macedonia Have an Obligation to offer the Bar Exam in Albanian?
Authors: Bekim Bruka & Erta Hoxha
Today, Albanian students in North Macedonia held a protest against the Ministry of Justice’s decision not to offer the bar exam in Albanian, alongside Macedonian. Following months of advocacy efforts and requests by student unions and Albanian political parties, the demonstration highlights a growing frustration with the country’s reluctance and practical inadequacy to ensure a Constitutional right.
Albanian is the native tongue of at least a quarter of North Macedonia’s population, and since the constitutional reforms emerging from the Ohrid Agreement in 2001, the language has progressively gained official status at both the local and national levels. In 2011, the Parliament amended Article 7 of the Constitution, granting official status to other languages spoken by at least 20 percent of the population, an article which had previously outlined Macedonian as the exclusive official language.
These developments culminated in the Law on the Use of Languages, passed by parliament in 2019, and largely seen as an expansion of the Amendment to Article 7 of the Constitution. The law extended the official use of Albanian beyond the 20 percent threshold and across the entire country, henceforth requiring all state institutions to enable the use of Albanian in their procedures and provide Albanian translations in their everyday work.
In practice, however, the usage of the Albanian language has not extended into professions governed by internal and state-administered procedures. The bar exam, which is administered by the Ministry of Justice and serves as the official gateway into practicing law in North Macedonia, is held exclusively in Macedonian. The Ministry has argued that while Albanian is an official language as per the Constitution and the Law on the Use of Languages of 2019, the Law on the Bar Examination does not provide any provision for taking the exam in a language other than Macedonian, nor does any relevant regulation within the judicial system.
This interpretation of the Ministry, however, reflects a classic lex specialis vs. constitutional supremacy issue. North Macedonia’s Law on the bar exam, published in the Official Gazette in 2019, is a regulation serving as part of the justice system pipeline. Extending on the Constitution’s Article 7, Article 2 (2) of the Law on the Use of Languages stipulates that citizens have the right to use any of the official languages in judicial, administrative, enforcement, or other procedures as envisioned by law. Article 1(3) of the same law, notes that Albanian is an official language in all state bodies, agencies and institutions exercising public power. Whether the bar is considered a procedure or part of an institution exercising public power, or both, it evidently is covered by the Law on the Use of Languages, and subsequently the Constitution.
Constitutional supremacy, as informed by Article 51 of North Macedonia’s Constitution, means that no ordinary law, whether general or lex specialis, can override the Constitution. Even if regulating a specific norm, oftentimes the common function of an agency’s regulation, such laws cannot in themselves take precedence over fundamental rights and principles enshrined in the Constitution. To allow that means undermining the hierarchical structure of law, opening a Pandora’s box for attempts to curtail constitutional provisions through lower legislation.
But even if insulated from the Constitution’s reach, the Law on the Bar Examination contains no provision designating Macedonian as the exclusive language to be used in the examination either. In fact, there is no mention of which language the Bar should be administered in at all. Under basic principles, the absence of prohibition cannot be read as one itself. The Law on the Use of Languages (2019) and revisions to the Law on the Bar Examination (2019) were passed around the same time, but one is silent on a matter the other expressly regulates. The Ministry of Justice’s position essentially asks to treat the bar exam law’s silence as overriding an expressed statutory obligation, which disrupts the legal order.
With the student protests on the government’s heels, the Ministry of Justice will be pressed to maintain their decision. Their position currently rests on a reading of the law that is difficult to sustain on its own terms. It seeks to use silence to prohibit, and a lower regulation to override both a constitutional guarantee and a statutory obligation. Ironically, it is the government itself trying to bend the texts to fit their agenda. To be allowed to study law in Albanian, only to be prohibited to test in it is a serious structural barrier to entry for Albanians in North Macedonia. The students’ requests are not radical, they simply ask that their right enshrined in the Constitution, elaborated in the Law on the Use of Languages, and left untouched by the Law on the Bar Examination, be honored.
Comments