Leverage, Not Law

How Europe Judges Albania by a Standard It Does Not Apply to Itself

By Albatros Rexhaj and Renada Bici

On March 5, 2026, the Czech Chamber of Deputies refused to lift the immunity of Prime Minister Andrej Babiš on EU subsidy fraud charges, and of Chamber President Tomio Okamura on incitement charges. Both refusals were carried by the governing coalition majority. No European capital responded. No diplomatic mission issued a statement. No accession process was affected.

Six days later, Albania’s Parliament declined to lift the immunity of Belinda Balluku, a former deputy prime minister no longer in government, on a request from the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office. Germany’s hesitation on Albania’s IBAR intensified. Brussels registered concern on the rule of law.

Same act. Opposite consequences. The disparity is the argument.

What Parliament did and did not do

The factual record must be corrected before the argument can proceed, because the framing circulating in European capitals is wrong in at least one significant respect.

Belinda Balluku is not a member of the Albanian government. She holds no executive power, distributes no public resources, and exercises no governmental function. The political stakes of an immunity decision are materially different when the subject is a former official with no current institutional reach. The framing of this vote as Parliament shielding a serving official from accountability is inaccurate.

What Parliament actually did is also not what it is being described as having done. It did not halt the investigation. It did not terminate the case. It did not legislate against SPAK’s mandate, budget, or jurisdiction. It did not bar the case from trial. It declined one request, for one coercive liberty-restricting measure. SPAK retains every instrument it had before the vote. The investigation continues. Prosecution and trial remain constitutionally available.

Parliament exercised a constitutional prerogative that exists precisely to prevent the automatic subordination of the legislative branch to the prosecutorial. That is not obstruction. It is the mechanism working as designed.

The immunity mechanism

The Venice Commission is unambiguous: the decision on whether to lift parliamentary immunity rests with parliament itself, not subject to direction by any external institution. Its rationale is to prevent the executive and judicial branches from instrumentalizing criminal proceedings against legislators. A parliament that cannot say no is a notary.

Albania’s constitutional framework makes this argument in its most restrictive possible form. Following the 2012 reform, Articles 73 and 103 narrow procedural immunity to a single category: coercive liberty-restricting measures. Criminal investigation and prosecution proceed without parliamentary authorization. Albania’s regime is already more restrictive than that of France, Italy, Spain, Greece, and Portugal. The parliament that declined SPAK’s request was operating within a constitutional architecture tilted considerably toward prosecutorial access. Declining a single coercive measure request under those conditions is not institutional failure. It is the mechanism working within the narrowest available parameters.

The logical flaw in SPAK’s argument

SPAK sought pre-trial detention on grounds of witness tampering risk, arguing that Balluku could exert pressure on witnesses through a network of associates.

The argument defeats itself.

If the capacity to intimidate witnesses derives from a network that operates independently of Balluku’s personal liberty, her detention does not neutralize it. The network functions whether she is free or confined. Pre-trial detention of the principal does not deactivate the instrument the prosecution itself describes as the threat.

The argument leads to one of two conclusions. Either the network is autonomous, in which case detention does not solve the problem it is invoked to justify. Or it is not autonomous, in which case the witness tampering risk is overstated. The argument does not hold in either direction.

No democratic system takes prosecutorial requests as self-validating. The presumption of innocence exists precisely because criminal accusation must not function as punishment before any finding of guilt. Parliament’s role is not to assess guilt. It is to assess whether the case for coercive action is proportionate, grounded, and free from the political instrumentalization that immunity protections exist to guard against. Parliament exercised that role. Whether it exercised it correctly is a legitimate question. Whether exercising it at all constitutes a rule of law failure is not.

There is a broader pattern here that deserves naming. SPAK’s record across multiple high-profile cases reveals a prosecutorial strategy organized substantially around pre-trial detention as the primary instrument of accountability. Prominent figures are held in detention pending proceedings that remain unresolved. The detention becomes the legible outcome: visible, politically communicable, presented as evidence of institutional seriousness. This is a spectacle function. It is not the same as securing convictions through evidence presented before an independent court. When pre-trial detention becomes the characteristic output of an anti-corruption institution, that institution’s priorities require scrutiny, not deference.

The Serbia contrast

The constitutional distance between what Albania’s parliament did and what it is being accused of becomes fully visible when placed alongside what Serbia’s parliament actually did in January 2026.

On January 28, the National Assembly adopted the Mrdić laws: amendments that restructured the judiciary, weakened the operational autonomy of the specialized anti-corruption prosecution, and recentralized hierarchical control over courts and prosecutors, in a procedure Commissioner Kos publicly called “very fast and non-transparent, without any consultations” and “a serious step backwards.” By March 19 the Commission was reviewing 400 million euros in EU Growth Plan payments.

Serbia’s parliament legislated to subordinate judicial and prosecutorial independence to executive control. Albania’s parliament exercised a constitutional prerogative in relation to a single coercive measure request, touching nothing in SPAK’s mandate, budget, or jurisdiction. The comparison being drawn between these two acts is not a comparison of degree. It is a category error.

What the European Parliament did five months ago

The category error is harder to sustain when the European Parliament’s own recent record is placed in the analysis.

On October 7, 2025, the European Parliament refused Hungary’s request to lift the immunity of Italian MEP Ilaria Salis, facing criminal charges in Hungary, by 306 votes to 305. In the same session it refused requests against Péter Magyar, Hungary’s principal opposition figure, and MEP Klára Dobrev, on charges its Legal Affairs Committee characterized as systematically politically motivated. The European Parliament’s own framework affirms that parliamentary immunity “is not a Member’s personal privilege” but a protection against “arbitrary political persecution,” and that lifting immunity “is not a guilty verdict.”

Five months before the Balluku vote generated diplomatic consequences for Albania, the European Parliament applied identical constitutional logic and faced none. The institutional reasoning was the same. The consequences were not.

The European record

The Czech precedent is not anomalous. It is the pattern.

France refuses approximately sixty percent of immunity-lifting requests at the liberty-restriction stage. Marine Le Pen was refused on multiple occasions. Serge Dassault, under investigation for electoral corruption, was refused arrest authorization in 2014. Sarkozy, despite multiple criminal proceedings, was never subjected to coercive liberty-restricting measures.

Italy’s refusal rate exceeds twenty-five percent. Matteo Salvini, as serving Minister of the Interior, faced prosecution for detaining 190 migrants at sea. The Senate refused authorization, accepted the collective governmental act argument, and closed the case. Salvini became Deputy Prime Minister. Italy’s EU standing was unaffected.

The German Bundestag refuses in approximately five to ten percent of cases requiring specific clearance, applying the fumus persecutionis standard, which leaves significant discretion with the chamber.

None of these countries has been required to justify their immunity decisions as a condition of EU membership or accession progress. The standard being applied to Albania exceeds the standard these countries apply to themselves, and have applied for decades, without consequence.

The record Albania built

Albania opened accession negotiations in 2022 and completed the opening of all 33 chapters by 2025. Commissioner Kos called the pace unprecedented. She was right. No other Western Balkans candidate has matched it. Albania aligned with EU foreign and security policy on Russia, Ukraine, and sanctions with a consistency no other candidate in the region produced. It pursued the vetting process and the creation of SPAK at significant domestic political cost, restructuring the judiciary from its foundations in a process the EU itself designed. It did not use its strategic position as leverage. It did not balance Brussels against other capitals. It did not threaten alternative alignments. It performed.

Serbia spent eleven years in negotiations and provisionally closed two chapters. Its accession is structurally blocked by Chapter 35, which conditions the entire process on normalization with Kosovo, a condition Belgrade has made a permanent political red line. Without Kosovo, Serbia’s decade of democratic erosion would have been the primary obstacle. Europe extended it years of strategic patience it had not earned on democratic grounds, because Belgrade’s cooperation on Kosovo, however declarative, was deemed geopolitically indispensable.

Albania has no equivalent leverage. It has only its record. When that record produced a single moment of institutional friction, the relational credit accumulated through three years of unprecedented reform was withdrawn faster than the credit Serbia spent a decade depleting.

The Examiner diagnosis

There is a more precise version of what happened with Germany, and it is not flattering to either side.

Germany was not applying a Serbia standard to Albania. It was registering the sudden absence of the Albania standard it had come to depend on. The mechanism was not legal assessment. It was expectation disruption. Albania had trained its European partners to expect continuous momentum, transparent communication, and reform delivered at a pace that made every preceding precedent irrelevant. When the Balluku vote arrived without the explanatory architecture that would have placed it in comparative constitutional context, Germany did not read a parliamentary decision. It read a signal. A withdrawal. A break in the pattern that three years of exceptional performance had made load-bearing.

This is the structure of what occurred: exceptional performance creates relational dependency; a single deviation from that performance is read as regression, not as normal institutional variation; the deviation triggers consequences that no comparable act by a lower-performing country would generate. The more Albania delivers, the higher the cost of any pause.

Europe does not misapply its standards. It applies them exactly as designed: relationally, not normatively, as instruments of expectation management rather than legal principle. That is the system. Albania encountered it.

Albania does not oscillate

Other candidate countries in the region oscillate. They negotiate their European commitments against domestic political costs, balance Brussels against other capitals, and treat reform as a variable to be adjusted rather than a direction to be held. Albania executes. It has executed consistently, at speed, at political cost, without the geopolitical leverage that bought Serbia a decade of patience, and without the oscillation that has left Montenegro’s progress intermittent and North Macedonia’s path structurally blocked.

That distinction is not rhetorical. It is the most important single fact about Albania’s European trajectory and it is precisely the fact the current diplomatic friction fails to reflect. A country that executes is owed a more accurate analytical standard than a country that oscillates. Not a more lenient one. A more precise one: one capable of distinguishing between a constitutional parliamentary act and systemic institutional regression.

That distinction has not been applied. It should be.

The verdict

The Albanian Parliament exercised a constitutional prerogative the Venice Commission affirms belongs exclusively to parliament, that the European Parliament exercised five months ago without consequence, that the Czech Republic exercised six days before the Balluku vote without consequence, and that France, Italy, and Germany exercise routinely at rates no accession framework has ever required them to justify.

It did so in a country that opened all 33 negotiating chapters at unprecedented speed, restructured its judiciary at the EU’s own design, created and fully preserved an independent anti-corruption prosecution whose mandate the government has not touched, and aligned with EU foreign policy with a consistency no other Western Balkans candidate has matched.

Here is what the evidence actually shows: Europe does not apply immunity standards normatively. It applies them relationally. Serbia was tolerated across a decade of democratic erosion because its cooperation on Kosovo carried geopolitical value that Albania cannot replicate. The European Parliament shielded its own members from prosecution five months ago and called it democratic principle. The Czech coalition refused immunity requests six days ago and nobody noticed. When Albania exercises identical constitutional logic, it generates IBAR consequences.

This is not a rule of law framework. It is a power framework operating inside rule of law language. Standards are not being applied according to legal principle. They are being applied according to leverage, expectation, and relational utility.

Albania is not being judged by law. It is being judged by the discipline of its own exceptional performance, and penalized for a single deviation from a standard no other country in this process is held to.

That is the system. Naming it is not a complaint. It is a precondition for changing it.

Albatros Rexhaj is an author, playwright, and national-security analyst with nearly three decades of experience in political and security affairs. 

Renada Bici is a Tirana-based lawyer practicing in civil, criminal, and administrative law. She holds a law degree from the University of Tirana and has experience in both private legal practice and public administration. She writes for the Tirana Examiner Legal Desk.