The One Clean Institution?

Anton Hofreiter told Albania’s politicians not to interfere with SPAK, “not even verbally”. In 2015 he did exactly that to a German prosecutor, and he was right.

by Ardit Rada (Tirana)

A German politician came to Tirana this week and explained Albania to Albanians.

Anton Hofreiter chairs the European affairs committee of the Bundestag. He told Deutsche Welle that our government and our parliament still have a great deal of work to do, and that our politicians must not hand arguments to those who want to keep Albania out of the European Union.

Then he reached SPAK. Nobody from politics should interfere with it, DW’s Albanian edition quotes him as saying, “not even verbally” [madje as verbalisht].

I know a politician who did it verbally.

On 31 July 2015 Germany’s Federal Prosecutor General was investigating two journalists from the blog Netzpolitik for treason. The investigation was open. The leader of the Greens in the Bundestag went to the Rheinische Post and called it “unbelievable, cynical and damaging to democracy” [unglaublich, zynisch und demokratieschädigend]. Four days later the justice minister retired the prosecutor. Six days after that the case was closed.

That politician was Anton Hofreiter. He was right. A prosecutor can ruin a man before any judge has said a word, and somebody elected has to be able to say so out loud.

So what changed between Berlin and Tirana? The principle, or the country?

The country. German law even lets a justice minister give a prosecutor instructions, and in 2019 the European Union’s own court ruled that German prosecutors are too dependent on ministers to issue a European Arrest Warrant. A German minister may give a prosecutor orders. An Albanian deputy may not give him an opinion.

Every Albanian knows this scene from home. A guest sits at your table and tells you the father is no good, the sons are no good, the whole house needs fixing. Then he points at the guard by the door, the one he and his friends helped you hire, and says nobody in the house is to say a word about him.

That is the Albania inside “not even verbally”. The government is dirty. The parliament is dirty. So are the parties, the ministries, the press, and for all we know the man selling byrek outside the Kuvend. One office is clean, and it happens to be the one our friends sponsored. The clean one must be protected from the dirty ones, even from their voices.

SPAK can search a ministry, seize a telephone and ask for a man to be jailed before his trial. In February 2025 a judge of the Constitutional Court was followed for fifteen days on a prosecutor’s signature, with no court asked. We gave it that power. The Albanian parliament wrote SPAK into the Constitution in 2016 with 140 votes out of 140. Yes, foreigners helped. We know. We were here.

Now the parliament that created it is told to keep quiet about it. The government too. Power over everyone, and criticism from no one. That arrangement has a name, and the name is tyranny. It does not matter how honest the guard is. Mr Hofreiter is asking a country to surrender to one of its own offices.

The Kuvend has not surrendered. In July it sent SPAK thirty-two recommendations, one of them, on how the chief investigator is appointed, at the European Union’s own request. By Mr Hofreiter’s rule that was interference.

He says Albania can close its chapters in 2027. The dirty government and the dirty parliament will have to do that, because a prosecutor’s office cannot sign an accession treaty. And the populists he warned us about say Albania’s institutions cannot be trusted. He says the same, with one exception.

We earned some of this. For thirty years Albanian politicians have gone from embassy to embassy calling each other thieves. The guests believed them. Now they trust the institution they sponsored more than the country around it.

Asked about a protest, he answered with a please: “please respect the rule of law” [ju lutem, respektoni shtetin e së drejtës]. To “all politicians” in Albania he gave one instruction, to do their job as well as they can. He calls himself a friend of Albania, and friends of this kind always know better. They fly in, take a briefing, and fly out having marked a country like a school exercise. At home Mr Hofreiter is one opposition deputy among 630. In Tirana he is Europe. It is the nonsense of a political class that hands candidates rules it would laugh at at home.

The Balkans know this tone. In Bosnia and in Kosovo, international missions sorted the local institutions into those they trusted, those they tolerated and those they supervised. Mr Hofreiter spoke in Tirana like a head of mission. In a protectorate that is policy. Albania is a NATO member negotiating its entry into the Union.

SPAK should prosecute every minister and every deputy it can prove a case against, and no government should ever be able to open or close one of its files. And we will go on talking about it. Some of the talk will be wrong, and some will come from men afraid of prison. They get to speak too. Mr Hofreiter did, in 2015.

He practises democracy at home. He does not get to prescribe obedience in ours.