Berisha did not file a complaint. He pronounced a verdict. A reform survives only if the politicians who voted it continue to honor it after the institution reaches their own door.
by Ardit Bido (Tirana)
The Albanian justice reform of 2016 was, by design, an act of self-limitation. The Assembly that voted it, including the parliamentary group I now belong to and the Democratic group that then sat in opposition, accepted that magistrates would be screened by a process the Assembly itself could not override, that the screening would be supervised by international monitors, and that its outcomes would bind the institutions of the state. The premise was simple. Politicians had failed to produce a clean judiciary on their own terms, and so they agreed to a procedure that took the question out of their hands.
Nine years later, on Monday, the leader of the Democratic Party stood at the door of the Special Prosecution Office, where he had reported under a court-imposed obligation to appear in the “Partizani” file, and announced that the man who built SPAK is a fraud.
The distinction between contesting a case and contesting an institution has never been more visible in Albanian public life, and it deserves to be named with the precision the moment requires.
Sali Berisha did not lodge a complaint with HIDAACI, the body whose function is to examine the asset declarations of magistrates. He did not address the High Inspector of Justice through the procedures designed for grievances against members of the prosecution. He did not file before any court. He read notarial papers to cameras and pronounced a verdict, calling Altin Dumani “Altin the fraudster,” “Altin Troplini,” a man “unworthy of any function except the defendants’ bench.” The audience was political, the forum was a doorstep chosen for its theatrical immediacy, and the outcome sought was not adjudication but the reputational dissolution of the figure most closely associated with the prosecution of the Democratic leader himself.
Set this against the conduct of the parliamentary group I sit in, and the difference becomes structural rather than rhetorical.
Erion Veliaj, the mayor of Tirana, faces SPAK charges. He is contesting them through counsel, in court, on the merits, with the procedural challenges the Code allows. Belinda Balluku, until recently Deputy Prime Minister, is under prosecution; she has mounted a legal defense, not a press conference declaring SPAK’s leadership impostors. In none of these cases has a Socialist minister, deputy, or former minister stood outside the doors of SPAK and accused its leadership of theft.
I do not pretend the figures under prosecution from our group are content with their treatment. They are not. They contest specific charges, specific procedural rulings, specific theories of liability. The law makes room for that, and they have used it. What they have not done is attempt to dissolve the institutional standing of the prosecution itself. They have fought cases. They have not fought the institution.
Berisha has chosen the opposite path, and he has chosen it openly.
Consider what his accusation means at the level of institutional design. Altin Dumani passed the vetting process. The vetting was the central innovation of the 2016 reform, voted by the Democrats themselves before the politics of prosecution turned against them. Its purpose was to subject every magistrate to a triple verification of assets, professional record, and integrity, under international supervision, and to produce outcomes that were binding precisely because the Assembly had designed them to be binding. If the architect of SPAK can be relitigated years after his confirmation, in a press conference, by a politician currently prosecuted by the body he built, then the vetting outcome is no longer binding. It is provisional. It is subject to revision by any politician with sufficient media reach and sufficient grievance.
That is the precedent Monday established. It is not a precedent about Dumani. It is a precedent about the entire architecture the Assembly of 2016 agreed to honor.
The pattern is not isolated. The Democratic parliamentary group, through several of its more prominent figures, has moved over the past two years from public endorsement of the justice reform their party once voted for, to qualified support when convenient, to open hostility once SPAK turned its attention to Democratic figures and Democratic-aligned interests. The trajectory bends in one direction. It bends toward institutional contempt at exactly the speed at which SPAK approaches the party leadership.
The parliamentary group I belong to, with substantially more figures under prosecution in raw numbers, has not bent in that direction. This is not offered as a defense of every position my group takes; it is a precise observation about institutional conduct under pressure. The Socialist officials prosecuted to date have, without exception, continued to contest their cases through legal mechanisms rather than through public declarations that the prosecution itself is illegitimate. When SPAK approaches Democrats, the Democratic leader stands at the door of SPAK and declares its former head a fraud.
There is a further detail that the historian’s eye should not miss. The mechanisms Berisha pretends do not exist are the mechanisms he refuses to use. HIDAACI receives complaints about asset declarations. The High Inspector of Justice receives complaints against magistrates. The competent court receives complaints about procedural conduct. None of these venues was chosen on Monday. The doorstep was chosen, because the doorstep produces what the institutions cannot: a verdict pronounced by the politician on his own authority, a parallel forum of opinion convened to override the official one. This is not the conduct of a citizen invoking the law against an officer he believes has broken it. It is the conduct of a politician seeking to make the law unenforceable against himself.
The country, and the European partners observing it, deserve to see the distinction with clarity. The principal threat to SPAK does not come from defendants who exercise their procedural rights, however vigorously they exercise them. It comes from a party leadership that has decided the institution is illegitimate the moment it touches them, and that has chosen the methods of public delegitimation over the methods the Assembly of 2016 designed.
There is room in any democracy to argue that a specific prosecution is wrong, that a specific procedural ruling should be overturned, that a specific magistrate has erred. There is no room, in any democracy that intends to remain one, for the leader of a major party to use his compliance with a court order as the stage on which he attempts to dissolve the standing of the prosecutor.
That is what happened on Monday in Tirana. It should be named for what it is, by those of us who voted for the reform that built SPAK and who intend to honor what we voted for, regardless of which of our colleagues the institution eventually reaches.
Ardit Bido is a Member of the Albanian Assembly for the Socialist Party and a historian. He writes in his personal capacity.
