The Independent Republics of the Republic of Albania

By Ylli Manjani, former Minister of Justice of Albania

There is a point at which the absurd stops being a mistake. It becomes a system.

On Wednesday the High Judicial Council, the KLGJ, the governing body the 2016 constitutional reform created for Albania’s courts, voted nine to zero to raise the reference salary of every judge in the country from 156,825 lekë to 222,425 lekë a month, with a further 14,000 lekë for qualification level, effective 1 August. It then instructed the budget offices of the courts at every level to calculate the difference backward, from 1 April 2023 to 31 July 2026. It is the first time in the history of the Republic that the Council has set magistrates’ pay itself. Until Wednesday, that pay was fixed by law. For scale: the old reference stood at 36 percent of the President’s salary, which fixes the Head of State at 435,625 lekë a month. A magistrate of the special anticorruption jurisdiction, whose statutory difficulty supplement is 80 percent of starting gross pay, now clears that figure within his first years on the bench.

The Council will say, correctly, that it did not arrive here on its own initiative. In February the Constitutional Court, ruling on a petition brought by the judges’ own associations, struck down the 2023 salary provisions as a hidden pay cut and gave parliament until 31 July to write a new formula. Parliament passed nothing. The National Association of Judges, the Union of Judges and the Association of Prosecutors then announced jointly that parliament’s inaction “has not created a legal vacuum,” since the Court itself had prescribed the mechanism to apply: a formula pegging judicial pay to the top tier of the public administration. The Council stepped in and applied it.

So the debate over the judiciary deciding its own pay, without asking anyone and without regard for the constitutional hierarchy of the state, has arrived exactly where it was always headed, at its own summit: self-payment at pleasure. And not merely at pleasure, but with retroactive accounting. Decide today and collect for yesterday as well.

In any normal state this would be called a conflict of interest. In the Republic of Albania it is called the independence of the judiciary.

Meanwhile the rest of the state sits and stares. Or worse, dances the dance of pride over the wondrous reform that brought us here. In truth, in the public arena it seems only Fatmir Xhafaj, the Socialist deputy who chaired the ad hoc parliamentary committee on the justice reform, still carries the flag of pride for this constitutional invention with any fanaticism.

But the damage has already been done.

The republic of the judges no longer recognizes itself as part of the Republic of Albania. It is a republic of its own, on the budget of the Republic of Albania. It takes its decisions itself and sends the invoice to the state. This invoice runs three years and four months backward, and the Treasury, which by law cannot pay out above the funds parliament appropriated, is about to discover that it has been appointed cashier to a decision nobody empowered it to refuse.

And do not be at all surprised if tomorrow the KLGJ decides to create its own Directorate of Taxation. Why not? If it can set its own salaries, why should it not collect its own taxes? Perhaps a customs service of its own too, with a seal and a republican coat of arms.

The same logic was used by the Republic of SPAK, the special anticorruption prosecution, which asked for a police force of its own to arrest citizens. Then we have the Republic of the GJKKO, the special anticorruption courts, a republic within the republic of the courts, which sets rules that not even the Court of Appeal in the corridor next door recognizes.

Every institution now has its own sovereignty. Its own seat, its own flag, and competences that stretch to where the state ends. In some cases they cross even the borders of the state, when they take it upon themselves to fight crime in other countries as well.

We have reached a grotesque point. We have created not a separation of powers but a fragmentation of the state.

The fathers of the theory of the separation of powers, Montesquieu and the rest, must be astonished in the next world at this Albanian innovation. They conceived separation to balance power. We invented the separation that dissolves the state.

It never occurred to any of them to design a parliament, elected by the sovereign people, that cannot make the laws it judges necessary, while the institutions it creates answer to no one.

It never occurred to any of them that a government should owe no account to parliament, while justice shuts the mouths of parliamentarians.

It never occurred to any of them that, in the name of independence, the will of the people’s elected representatives could be overturned.

And above all, it never occurred to any of them that, in the name of independence, one power would decide for itself how much it will be paid, more even than the Head of State.

God grant the President does not think of assigning himself his own salary, reasoning, if the officials of the state do it, why not I, as head of that state?

Then why stop there?

Parliament sets its own pay.

The government, which holds the state’s finances in its hands, sets its own higher still.

The Minister of Finance may decide to be paid more than the Prime Minister.

Why not?

By this logic, every institution is a republic unto itself, and the Republic of Albania remains only the cash machine where all the small republics go to withdraw the money.

This is the result of the constitutional amendments of 2016, drafted with the Venice Commission and adopted to the sustained applause of Brussels and Washington, which imposed a state organization in which independence was converted into untouchability while balance disappeared. The powers no longer check one another. Each simply lives on its own sovereign territory.

This is not reform. This is the deformation of the state.

That is why the time has come for a full review of the constitutional organization. Powers must be separated, but also balanced. Independent, but not sovereign over the Republic. No institution can stand above the state that creates it.

For years we were told: how fortunate that we made this reform, for now we shall go to Europe.

With this model one goes nowhere.

Not to Europe.

Not even to the edges of the authority of the Republic of Albania.

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.