Public Conviction” as Evidence? When Justice Surrenders to Perception

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 may have committed the criminal acts” — is not merely imprecise. It is constitutionally dangerous.

What is the Court saying, in plain terms? That what is proved inside a courtroom no longer matters. What matters is whether a convincing perception has been created outside it.

This is not a legal standard. It is a sociological one. Worse still: it is a propagandistic one.

In a state governed by law, a security measure — above all, pre-trial detention — cannot rest on what “appears” to be the case. It must rest on concrete, verifiable evidence, contested through adversarial proceedings. Every departure from that principle is a slide toward arbitrariness.

The formula is not new. It was invented and applied repeatedly by the Special Court of Appeal against Corruption and Organised Crime. What is new is that it has now been implicitly legitimised by the Constitutional Court itself. A dangerous doctrinal precedent has been set.

Which brings the essential question: who, exactly, is this “outside observer”?

The public? Public opinion? Portal headlines? Because in practice, “public conviction” does not arise in a vacuum. It is cultivated daily by the deliberate leaking of investigative materials, selectively released intercepts, and a carefully constructed media narrative. Albanian public opinion has been saturated with the belief that everyone steals. If that same public is now invoked as the standard for justifying the deprivation of liberty, a vicious circle has been formalised: accusation produces perception, perception produces detention — all before any trial has taken place.

This inverts one of the foundational principles of law: the presumption of innocence. Rather than the state proving guilt beyond reasonable doubt, individuals are held in prison because they “appear as though they might be guilty.”

Under this logic, criminal proceedings in Albania are no longer the place where truth is established. They have become a formality that follows the real verdict — pre-trial detention.

And if convincing the public is now sufficient to justify action against an individual, the question that follows naturally is: what do we need courts for?

If the real decision is made on television screens and in leaked dossiers, the courtroom is nothing more than institutional scenery.

This is no longer a problem confined to a single case. It is a model being consolidated. And every such model carries a cost — not only for the individual who is its subject today, but for confidence in justice itself tomorrow.

Reform is no longer enough. What is required is a reckoning.

Ylli Manjani is an Albanian lawyer and former Minister of Justice (2015–2017). Since his dismissal from government, after which he publicly accused the Rama administration of protecting corruption, he has returned to legal practice and become one of Albania’s most persistent critics of prosecutorial overreach and judicial dysfunction.