Supreme Court judges are elected for four-year terms by the People's Assembly. The court consists of a chairman, deputy chairmen, and assistant judges, the exact number being determined by the Presidium of the People's Assembly. The Supreme Court is broken down into collegiums to handle different types of cases, such as penal, civil, and military. It also sits in a plenum in order to issue directives concerning legal practices, to hear appeals from decisions made by its collegium, and to study the operation of the court system in its entirety.
POLITICAL DYNAMICS
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat
As officially defined by the Constitution, the state is a form of dictatorship of the proletariat. The power of the state constitutionally belongs to the workers and peasants, represented locally by the people's councils, which supposedly make up the political base of the state. In legislation and in official documents dealing with elections, it has been stated that the people not only enjoy freedom of choice concerning candidates but also have the right to supervise the work of their elected representatives and the right of recall if they are dissatisfied. In practice, such people's democracy does not exist, and the dictatorship of the proletariat—that is, the rule of the people over themselves—is a facade behind which the real dictatorship of the Party elite operates.
The Constitution provides for direct, secret vote to elect representatives to all governmental bodies, from the people's councils in villages to the highest organ of the state, the People's Assembly. The voters themselves do nothing on their part to be registered in the electoral lists. These lists are drawn up for every type of election by the people's councils and are supposed to include all citizens who reach age eighteen on or before the day of the elections.
The democratic character of these elections is allegedly guaranteed by the procedure or right for nominating candidates. This right legally belongs to the Party, the Democratic Front, trade unions, and social organizations and is exercised by the central organs of these organizations and their organs in the districts. Nominations, with Party approval, also are made at the general meetings of workers and employees in the enterprises and state farms, of soldiers in their detachments, and of peasants in their agricultural collectives or villages.
All meetings for the selection of candidates are held under the auspices of the Democratic Front, in whose name all the candidates are presented for election. The only legal requirement of a candidate is that he enjoy the right to election, that the organization which proposes him confirm its intention in writing, and that he accept his candidacy for that of the Assembly was a "vivid expression of the socialist democ-him. In practice, all candidates are preselected, and the meetings simply confirm the Party choice.
Political power, according to official documents, is thus vested in the broad masses who, through various organizations to which they belong, choose the candidates to be elected to all state organs, including the people's courts. The candidate who receives one more vote than half the number of voters registered in the electoral zone is proclaimed the winner and becomes, in theory, the agent representing the sovereignty of the people.
The highest organ of state power, according to official dogma, is the People's Assembly, composed of representatives elected by direct vote who exercise the sovereignty and will of the people. The aim of the People's Assembly, this dogma alleges, is to carry out the main functions of directing and supervising the people's democratic state. The Assembly's sphere of action includes practically all the political, economic, social, and cultural fields through the passage of laws. "These laws," according to an official document published in 1964, "on their part determine the juridical form of the line pursued by the Albanian Workers' Party in building socialism in Albania." The same document that stated that the laws passed by the Assembly were but the juridical form of Party policies declared that the concentration of all state power in the hands of the Assembly was a "vivid expression of the socialist democracy of the state system of the People's Republic of Albania."
Another document, published in 1963, asserted that economic power and political power were indivisible and that a combination of the two formed the state power. The representative nature of the socialist state, the document declared, was rooted in the socialist economic basis of the country, derived from the state ownership of the means of production and from the property of the cooperative and collective organizations, principally the agricultural collectives. All mines and subsoil resources, waters, forests and pastures, industrial enterprises, the means of air, rail, and sea communications, post, telegraph, telephones, radio broadcasting stations, and banks had become the property of the people.