Friday 20:07
The Examiner
When courts trade evidence for perception, detention stops being law and starts being belief. Renada Bici | Tirana Examiner Legal Desk On Wednesday, Albania’s Constitutional Court — the country’s highest judicial authority and the final domestic guardian of individual rights — upheld the continued imprisonment of a former head of state pending trial. What it …
Daily Briefing
EU INTEGRATION The session opened with a procedural dispute over the scheduling of a parliamentary debate on EU integration. The opposition sought an immediate debate; majority leader Taulant Balla proposed May 7 or 14. A vote approved May 14. Balla accused the Democratic Party of having voted against all 23 EU-related laws passed since the …
The Examiner
By Ylli Manjani (Tirana) The Constitutional Court’s decision to reject Ilir Meta’s appeal is not a procedural footnote. It is a warning signal about how criminal justice actually functions in reformed Albania. The reasoning the Court employed — that there “appear to be facts capable of convincing even an outside observer that the person …
The Examiner
by Arsejda Gjyli (Tirana) Gazment Bardhi delivered his statement on parliamentary obstruction with the precision of a man who knows his real audience is not in the chamber. The report — cataloguing six months of rejected committees, refused interpellations, and disciplinary exclusions — was addressed formally to the Speaker of Parliament and, more meaningfully, to every …
The Examiner
by Albatros Rexhaj (Tirana) Ditmir Bushati has written a note about Albania’s EU accession process that reads, at first encounter, like serious intervention. The concern he raises, that the public debate has been hollowed out into a performance of slogans while the substantive reform conversation goes unexamined, is not wrong. But a legitimate concern …
The Examiner
by Ditmir Bushati Albania’s EU accession process is being covered by the fog of a debate that serves no one. Public opinion is being oriented around the approval or non-approval of the European Commission’s Interim Benchmark Assessment Report (IBAR) in the field of the rule of law. From the very starting point, the negotiation …
Daily Briefing
the Newsroom (Tirana) Prime Minister Edi Rama used an extensive visit to Durrës on Thursday to deliver a layered political message spanning EU accession strategy, opposition criticism, construction sector governance, and affordable housing reform, addressing Socialist Party structures, entrepreneurs, and a party assembly in the course of a single day. Speaking at a PS …
Daily Briefing
Prime Minister Edi Rama used a Socialist Party assembly in Lezhë on Tuesday to reiterate the government’s EU accession timeline, announce a healthcare pay upgrade, and outline plans to redesign hospital management along a public-private hybrid model. by the Newsroom (Tirana) Prime Minister Edi Rama addressed the Socialist Party assembly in Lezhë on Tuesday …
Daily Briefing
ALBANIA PARLIAMENT | DISPATCH 7 April 2026 Albania’s Socialist Party voted down two Democratic Party requests for parliamentary investigative committees Tuesday, extending what the opposition described as a systematic shutdown of oversight mechanisms, while a separate confrontation erupted over proposed rules changes touching on an unresolved Constitutional Court ruling. The session of the Conference …
Hard Talks
He built a publication in a language he does not fully speak, to cover a country the world largely ignores, with a team of volunteers working from laptops and smartphones. The idea came to him not in a Tirana office but in a hotel room in a distant country, reading a foreign magazine, thinking about …
Hard Talks
Albania’s new Foreign Minister spent his career inside the institutions the country now seeks to join. But as EU enlargement enters its most demanding phase, a parliamentary vote shields his former deputy prime minister from arrest, his prime minister co-signs a European initiative with a man who declared war on Albania days later, and Brussels …
Hard Talks
Everest employs around 700 workers and is expanding into the United States. As Albania moves toward EU integration, we ask CEO Sokol Çupi whether industrial growth is reinforcing institutions — or quietly outpacing them. by Elis Zenelaj (Tirana) Introduction Everest Sh.p.k. began in 1997. Today it operates one of Albania’s largest aluminum production platforms, …
US - International
The Iran war has torn away the last polite fiction sustaining NATO. For Albania and Kosovo, two states whose entire post-war trajectories were built on the assumption of Western permanence, the consequences are not abstract. by Klea Ukaj (Michigan, USA) There is a sentence that does not appear in any official communiqué but that …
US - International
by Klea Ukaj (Michigan, USA) On May 19, 2021, the United States designated Sali Berisha persona non grata under Section 7031(c) of the State Department appropriations act. The charge: significant corruption, misappropriation of public funds, interference with public processes, a sustained pattern of self-protection at the expense of accountability. His wife, his son, and …
US - International
A Serbian state-backed film turns contested allegations into lived experience — a case study in how memory competition is reshaping policymakers’ understanding of Kosovo’s past. By Albatros Rexhaj (Tirana) Serbia did not just premiere a film on March 17. It staged a message. Arno Gujon promoted it personally. Ana Brnabić attended. A companion exhibition …
