The Independence No One Can Verify

by Renada Bici (Legal Examiner Desk)

On the ninth of December 2024, in the Treaty Room of the United States Department of State, Secretary Antony Blinken conferred his government’s Anti-Corruption Champions Award on Altin Dumani, then Chief Special Prosecutor of Albania. The citation praised leadership exercised with integrity, professionalism, and courage. The Embassy in Tirana published the photographs. Forty six days later, on 24 January 2025, the new American administration froze the assistance programs that had accompanied SPAK since its creation, and the institution found itself issuing a public statement whose central argument deserves more attention than it received: our core budget, SPAK said, is Albanian, and our work continues. The same statement, with a candor that serves this analysis better than any outside inventory could, named the channels through which the support had flowed since the institution’s founding: the American missions OPDAT, ICITAP, DEA, and FBI.

Consider what the institution was doing in that statement. It was answering a question about foreign dependence by pointing to the one dimension of its existence, the budget line, where dependence can be publicly measured and publicly excluded. The argument was correct. It was also, and this is the subject of this article, the only argument of its kind available. For every other surface where SPAK meets its foreign patrons, no Albanian citizen possesses any instrument by which the institution’s independence could be checked, confirmed, or refuted. The question this article poses is not whether SPAK is directed from abroad. We have seen no evidence that it is, and its domestic record argues for its professionalism. The question is architectural: by what mechanism could the Albanian public ever know?

The guarantees that exist all point in one direction

Begin with what the law protects against, because the pattern is instructive. The 2016 constitutional amendments and Law 95/2016 built around the Special Prosecution a system of guarantees that is, by regional standards, formidable. Prosecutors are appointed by the High Prosecutorial Council, not by the government. Their mandates are fixed and their removal is judicialized. The institution proposes its own budget directly, shielded from executive revision. The executive cannot assign cases, cannot withdraw them, cannot instruct. Every prosecutor passed through vetting. Each of these guarantees is real, each was hard won, and each answers the same threat: capture by Albanian power. The entire protective architecture faces inward. Read the statute from beginning to end and you will find articles shielding the institution from the government, from parliament, from the parties, from the courts of ordinary jurisdiction, from its own hierarchy. You will not find one article addressing the possibility that influence might arrive from the direction of the institution’s friends.

This is not an oversight anyone should be blamed for. The reform of 2016 was designed against the dangers of 2016, and the dangers of 2016 were domestic. But the consequence is an asymmetry worth stating plainly: against the Albanian state, SPAK’s independence is guaranteed by enumerable, citable, enforceable provisions. Against its patrons, it is guaranteed by nothing except the character of the people involved. One of these is a legal condition. The other is a hope.

The surfaces of contact, and what governs them

Inventory the points at which foreign states and institutions lawfully touch SPAK, and ask, for each, what rule governs the contact and what record of it a citizen could consult.

The first surface is the vetting itself. The constitutional annex of 2016 gave the International Monitoring Operation a formal role in the re-evaluation of every Albanian magistrate: access to the files, presence in the process, the power to recommend. The arrangement was accepted as the price of credibility, and it worked. But note its structural meaning. The careers of the prosecutors now serving passed, at their foundational moment, through the judgment of foreign observers, and no Albanian mechanism reviewed the reviewers. The vetting protected the institution from its past. Nothing in the design asked who would protect it from its protectors.

The second surface is the resident advisers. For years, legal advisers and law enforcement personnel of partner states have worked alongside the Special Prosecution and the National Bureau of Investigation: training, mentoring, technical assistance. Much of this is valuable and none of it is secret in the sense of being denied. But the agreements under which foreign personnel operate in proximity to Albanian criminal files are not published. Their terms of reference are not public documents. No register discloses who is embedded where, under what mandate, with access to what. When the American programs were suspended in January 2025 and restored in April, restructured, in the words of the State Department’s own spokesman, to align with the new administration’s policy priorities, the Albanian public learned two things it had no other way of knowing: that the presence was extensive enough for its suspension to require a statement, and that its scope is set in Washington, by criteria announced in Washington, revisable in Washington. What the restored presence consists of today is not knowable from any Albanian source. And where the texts of the institution’s foreign instruments do surface, they surface abroad. The working arrangement between SPAK and the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, signed by the two chief prosecutors to permit direct cooperation and the exchange of information in criminal investigations, was announced from Luxembourg and lives on the foreign party’s website. There is no Albanian register in which an Albanian citizen would find it. The asymmetry extends to the publication venue itself.

The third surface is money and material, and here the January 2025 episode briefly made the invisible measurable. Foreign assistance to SPAK, equipment, training, software, travel, expertise, flows outside the state budget whose independence the institution correctly asserts, and in the days after the freeze, reporting from the American government’s own assistance data put a figure on it: of roughly 2.3 billion lek in the institution’s total resources for 2025, some 700 million lek, nearly thirty percent, was foreign financing. The number was assembled in Washington, from Washington’s records, because it could not have been assembled in Tirana. There is no public register of foreign assistance received by the Special Prosecution, no disclosure of its conditions, no line in the annual report that itemizes it. A citizen who wished to know what the institution has accepted, from whom, and against what expectations, has nowhere to look, and the one time she was told, she was told by the donor.

The fourth surface is evaluation. SPAK’s performance is graded, formally and annually, by the European Commission, in reports that name the institution, count its indictments, and attach the grade to the national interest of the Albanian state through the accession process. No Albanian institution grades SPAK this way. The one systematic, consequential, published evaluation of the Special Prosecution’s work is written abroad. The institution has organized itself accordingly: its own annual report discloses that in 2024 it recruited two specialists for a dedicated Reporting Sector to the European Union, a permanent internal unit whose function is reporting to Brussels. There is no equivalent sector for reporting the international dimension to the Assembly, because the Assembly has never asked for one. An institution, like a person, attends to its only grader. And read what the grader certifies. The Commission’s most recent rule of law assessment praises SPAK for showing independence despite increased political pressure, organized crime, and media hostility. Every threat on that list is domestic. The only published certificate of the institution’s independence measures independence exclusively against Albanian dangers, and it is issued by a patron, who does not pose the patron question, perhaps because no grader poses a question about itself.

The fifth surface is the political level, and it was the subject of these pages in May. When a foreign Justice Minister was received at SPAK headquarters without the knowledge of the Albanian Foreign Ministry, the episode revealed that even the coordination obligations that do exist in law, Article 23 of the institution’s own statute, the Foreign Service Law’s single channel principle, are treated as optional where patrons are concerned, by both sides of the relationship.

And the sixth surface is honor itself. The medal of December 2024 was, by every account, deserved. It was also a foreign government’s highest anti-corruption distinction, conferred personally by a foreign minister of state on a serving Albanian chief prosecutor, and here, for once, Albanian law has something to say. Law 93/2022 on decorations, readopted in February 2024 after a presidential return and in force since that spring, provides in Article 37 that every Albanian citizen decorated by a foreign state must convey to the State Protocol full information on the decoration, its physical description, and a copy of the accompanying certificate, and that the Protocol must report each case to the College of Orders and Medals at the new Chancellery, which keeps the register of decorated persons and reports annually on the state of decorations in the Republic. The December 2024 award therefore fell squarely under a legal duty months in force. The prosecutorial ethics code the High Prosecutorial Council adopted in 2022 contains the general integrity standards such codes contain, but a code of conduct is not a statute, and general rules on gifts are not rules on decorations conferred by foreign sovereigns; Article 37 is the only instrument of positive law that captures the Treaty Room.

Notice, first, what kind of rule this is. It is notification, not authorization: the state asks to be informed after the fact, not to consent before it, and the legislator knew the difference, since the same statute bars deputies and ministers from receiving Albanian orders while in office, and since President Begaj, returning the law to the Assembly, proposed in his published reasons precisely the stronger rule, a written approval requirement for holding foreign decorations, backed by fines. The Assembly readopted the law in February 2024 without it. The authorization model this article will recommend below is therefore not an import; it was placed before the Kuvend by the Albanian head of state and declined.

Notice, second, where the rule leads. The register it feeds is not published, so whether the duty is honored is invisible, and whether the College of Orders and Medals that is supposed to keep it has even been constituted in practice is itself a question without a public answer. And the question the rule makes possible has, to our knowledge, never been asked: was the Treaty Room decoration conveyed to the State Protocol, reported to the College, and entered in the register, as Article 37 commands? That question has a documentary answer, and the answer, whichever it is, would be the first verified fact ever produced about the patron dimension of the institution’s existence.

What a citizen would need, and does not have

Set the inventory against the question of verification. Suppose an Albanian citizen, neither hostile to SPAK nor credulous, wished to satisfy herself that the institution is not directed from abroad. What could she consult? The statute offers her guarantees against her own government. The annual report to the Assembly accounts for cases and statistics, not for the international dimension. The assistance is unregistered, the adviser agreements unpublished, the evaluative relationship one directional, and the single register the law does provide, the decorations file at the State Protocol and the Chancellery, is unpublished and unverified in practice. Investigative secrecy, proper in itself, seals the file level, so that even the pattern of foreign contact around specific cases is beyond inquiry. She is left with exactly one instrument: trust.

Now observe the epistemic trap, because it is the heart of the matter. An institution that is not directed from abroad and an institution that is would, under the current architecture, look identical from the outside. Both would show the same medals, the same advisers, the same grades, the same silences. The absence of evidence of direction is genuinely meaningless in a system that could not produce such evidence if it existed. This cuts in both directions, and honesty requires saying so: it means the institution cannot be convicted on suspicion, and it means the institution cannot be acquitted on the record, because there is no record. The citizens of a republic should not be asked to hold their most powerful prosecutorial body in a state of permanent unfalsifiable faith. Faith is not a constitutional category.

And unverifiability is not a neutral condition. Transparency instruments are not built because misconduct has been shown, and they are not insults to the people they cover; they exist because a body wielding extraordinary public power must be able to demonstrate its independence to any citizen who asks, whoever asks and whatever the motive behind the asking. Deny it that ability and the cost falls first on the institution itself. Under the current design, SPAK’s accusers cannot prove direction and SPAK cannot disprove it, which means every attack on the institution, however cynical its origin, lands on ground the law never fortified, and the institution’s only reply is the one this article began with: an appeal to the budget line, the single surface where the architecture permits an answer. The state built SPAK a fortress against its enemies and left it no answer to a question its friends made inevitable.

What serious states do at home

The partners themselves do not live this way, and the comparison is once again the sharpest instrument available.

The United States wrote the principle into its founding text. The Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause forbids any person holding an office of profit or trust from accepting any present, emolument, office, or title of any kind whatever from any foreign state without the consent of Congress, and the Foreign Gifts and Decorations Act operationalizes the rule: decorations from foreign governments to American officials require statutory authorization, are recorded, and are reported. An American federal prosecutor could not accept from a foreign ministry what an Albanian chief prosecutor accepted in the Treaty Room, not because the honor would be undeserved, but because the American system treats every foreign present to an official as a matter requiring the sovereign’s recorded consent.

Germany requires its civil servants to obtain permission before accepting foreign decorations and titles, and treats foreign funding of federal justice institutions as constitutionally unthinkable outside the budget law. France channels all foreign engagement of its national prosecution offices through defined ministerial coordination. Across the serious states of the transatlantic system, the principle is uniform: foreign influence upon justice institutions is regulated as a structural risk even when, especially when, the foreigners are allies, because the architecture does not distinguish between friendly influence and hostile influence. It regulates influence. The distinction between friend and adversary is a judgment about today. The architecture is built for all days.

Albania regulates one corner of it, with a form filed after the fact. The state that submitted its entire magistracy to international monitoring, that hosts embedded foreign personnel beside its criminal files, that is graded annually from abroad, asks of the foreign dimension of its most consequential institution’s existence exactly one thing: a notification to the protocol office, feeding a register nobody publishes, after its own President asked for more and its own Assembly said no. The partners, operating in Albania, accept and sustain an arrangement that every one of them prohibits at home. This is the same asymmetry these pages documented in May, at a larger scale: the principle is understood perfectly. It is applied selectively.

The remedy is disclosure, and it costs nothing

The conclusion of this analysis is a specification, not a suspicion. If the question “is SPAK independent of its patrons” is to have an answer that a citizen can check, four instruments would suffice, and none of them touches prosecutorial independence in case selection by a millimeter. A public register of all foreign assistance received by the Special Prosecution and the Bureau, with donors, amounts, and conditions, so that the next thirty percent is counted in Tirana rather than Washington. Publication of the framework agreements under which foreign personnel work alongside the institution, terms of reference included, so that an Albanian citizen does not learn of her chief prosecutor’s foreign arrangements from a foreign website. An upgrade of Article 37 of the decorations law, for serving magistrates and senior officials, from notification after the fact to authorization before it, with the register published, which is what American law has required of its own officials since 1966 and what the Albanian President proposed to the Albanian Assembly in 2023. And a section of the annual report to the Assembly devoted to the international dimension: who assisted, who evaluated, who visited, under what framework, staffed, if need be, by the same kind of dedicated sector the institution has already created for reporting to Brussels. Every one of these is disclosure, not control. Every one strengthens the institution it touches, because an independence that can be demonstrated is worth more, at home and in Brussels alike, than an independence that must be believed.

The institution’s defenders will answer that SPAK’s record speaks for itself, and the record is indeed considerable. But a record of prosecuting domestic power answers the domestic question, the one the 2016 architecture was built to answer, and it is the only question the architecture permits to be answered. The other question, the one posed at the beginning, remains where the law left it: outside the system, unprovided for, addressed to the public’s faith. The reform of 2016 taught Albania that trust in institutions is built by verification, not by assurance. That lesson was applied, rigorously and to lasting benefit, against every Albanian threat to the institution’s independence. It has never once been applied to the institution’s friends. Until it is, the honest answer to the question in our title is the one no one wants to give: the Albanian people cannot be sure, not because anything improper has been shown, but because the architecture was never built to let them know.

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.