Tell Albania What Enough Looks Like

Editorial Board

On 26 May the European Union told Albania it had met the interim benchmarks for the fundamentals cluster and could start closing chapters. Three closed in July. The same day it set the closing benchmarks for the rule-of-law chapters. For corruption, the common position of 22 May asks Albania to demonstrate “a solid and sustained track record of investigations, prosecutions, and final convictions”, particularly at high level, together with a record of asset seizure and confiscation. The presidency described the phase now beginning as one “focused on implementation, solid track records and lasting results”, in a process it called merit-based.

On Tuesday a court suspended the director of the intelligence service on the special prosecutor’s request and ordered her confined to her home. That is not the benchmark met. One case, however high it reaches, is evidence towards a track record, not the record itself, and we will not pretend the text says otherwise. But it is evidence of exactly the kind the benchmark was written to produce, and it makes a question urgent that this newspaper thinks Brussels should answer in public.

What does enough look like?

The same common position is not shy of numbers. Elsewhere in it, Albania is told to reach three quarters of its annual case-evaluation projections and to fill about three quarters of judicial vacancies. Brussels wrote a figure wherever it wanted one. When it reached the corruption benchmark, the one the public will judge the whole reform by, it wrote two adjectives. How many high-level prosecutions make a record solid is not there. How many final convictions, over how many years, make it sustained is not there either, and neither is the answer to whether an acquittal counts against the prosecutor or for the courts. What the record must contain is set out at length; how much of it, for how long, and by what test of sufficiency, is not.

The document is not stingy with credit. It welcomes tangible progress in investigations, prosecutions and convictions, including of high-ranking officials, and welcomes the special prosecutor’s results by name. Albania is being recognised. What it is not being given is an endpoint whose decisive words mean something a candidate can measure, in a process that calls itself merit-based. A country that has a former president in detention, the capital’s mayor in custody, a former prime minister on trial, a deputy prime minister under investigation and its intelligence chief under a house-arrest order is entitled to ask at what point “sustained” stops being a request for more.

“Sustained” is a word without an end. A standard that asks for more can always be met with more. That is not a criterion. It is a discretion, and it is one no member answers to as a condition of staying in. Members face rule-of-law reports, infringements and, on occasion, a frozen budget; none of them faces a closing benchmark.

There is an honest objection to what we are asking, and it should be met rather than avoided. Brussels cannot write “ten convictions” or “a 70 per cent conviction rate” into a benchmark without telling independent courts what to produce, and the same common position insists on their independence. Fine. Then the indicators must be something else, and they can be: how long the record has to run, how many of the prosecutor’s measures survive appeal, how confiscation performs, whether the record holds across a change of government, how the trend moves year on year. Any of those can be written down without ordering a judge to convict anyone. What cannot be defended is a benchmark whose only published test is the reviewer’s satisfaction.

Nobody here expects Chapter 23 to close because of one Tuesday. We expect Brussels to do to its benchmark what it asks Albania to do to its institutions: make it measurable. Say how long sustained is. Say which indicators, short of a conviction quota, will tell the country it has arrived. If there is a reason this benchmark must stay a matter of judgment while the others carry percentages, say that too, so Albania knows it is being assessed and not measured.

The Council said in May that determined reforms lead to concrete progress. The determination has been supplied. The concreteness is now owed from the other side. Not out of anger. Out of arithmetic. Respect is cheap. Say the words, and then say when.

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