The Reform Is the Floor, Not the Ceiling

A response to Carlo Bollino on SPAK, procedure, and the missing variable

Albatros Rexhaj

Carlo Bollino’s recent column reaches for Guantanamo to describe what is happening inside Albanian justice. The reach is rhetorically powerful and structurally wrong, and the wrongness matters because it obscures the argument Albania actually needs to have.

Guantanamo was extrajudicial detention by executive order, sustained outside the constitutional system on the authority of an emergency frame that explicitly suspended ordinary process. Defendants had no counsel for years. There was no appellate court. There was no constitutional review. The institutional architecture that exists to test prosecutorial claims was not weakened, it was absent by design.

SPAK and GJKKO are the opposite proposition. They are constitutional bodies operating under codified procedure, subject to appellate review, with defense counsel present throughout. The procedural disputes Bollino catalogs, the file access problems, the format restrictions, the timing pressures, are taking place inside a functioning judicial architecture. They are arguments about how the system is operating, not evidence that the system does not exist. To collapse that distinction is to hand a rhetorical weapon to the camp that wants the reform undone, not corrected.

The procedural questions are real. A defendant receiving sixty thousand pages of evidence in print, in a cell where digital access is prohibited, with one week to read it, is not an abstraction. If accurately reported, that is the kind of detail that would survive scrutiny in any serious filing before the European Court of Human Rights. The asymmetry between what prosecutors can leak and what defendants can timely access has become structurally untenable. Closed hearings under conditions that exceed comparative European practice deserve scrutiny. These are legitimate concerns and they require correction.

The question is where the correction comes from, and here the argument runs into its hardest problem.

Corrections to procedural drift inside a constitutional system are supposed to come from inside that system: from GJKKO ruling on contested motions, from the Constitutional Court reviewing systemic questions, from the appellate architecture doing the work it was built to do. A judge in a Tirana hearing room, asked to rule on whether the conditions of file access satisfy the defendant’s right to prepare a defense, is the actor on whom the entire institutional design ultimately rests. Whether that judge will rule against the prosecutor in a politically charged case, on the basis of procedural law rather than political pressure, is the test the architecture must pass for the design to function. The test has not been failed. It has also not yet been comprehensively passed. The appellate courage the argument depends on has been uneven. The Constitutional Court operates under political pressure that has not been fully tested. Prosecutorial prestige can affect judicial review in ways that procedural rules cannot fully insulate against. None of this disproves the architecture. All of it complicates the claim that the architecture is already doing what it was built to do.

The response to that complication is not to route around the institutions. It is to insist that they do the work. Every time the procedural debate is moved into the street, into the talk shows, into the diplomatic channels of foreign embassies, the institutions are weakened, not strengthened. The defenders of the reform owe the reform the discipline of demanding correction through the channels the reform itself created, even when those channels are slow, even when they are imperfect, even when the political temperature would make a faster route seem more attractive. Bollino’s column, written from outside, is not the most damaging version of this externalization, but it is an instance of it.

The actual problem is not the one Bollino names, and it is not visible from outside.

Albanian institutional culture has not yet caught up to Albanian institutional architecture. The reform built new structures. It did not yet build the institutional habits those structures require. Inside post-reform institutions, pre-reform mentality continues to operate. Prosecutors trained in a culture of public theater carry that culture into a system designed for prosecutorial restraint. Defense counsel trained to litigate through the media carry that habit into a system designed for litigation through the courts.

The press is the third actor in this ecology and the one least examined. Albanian media did not develop alongside a functioning justice system, it developed in the absence of one, and the habits it acquired in that absence have not been unlearned. Where there is no register for procedural argument, every prosecutorial action becomes a moral event, and every defense becomes either confession or persecution depending on the political alignment of the outlet. Judicial literacy was never built because there was never a judiciary that rewarded it. What replaced it was moral spectacle, and moral spectacle is the medium through which procedural drift now travels. The leaks that reach the press, the verdicts the press delivers before evidence is tested, the closed hearings that become subjects of public theater rather than legal scrutiny, all of this is downstream of a media culture that has no other register available to it.

The missing variable is institutional self-restraint. Përmbajtja institucionale. It is the discipline of treating constitutional procedure as a binding constraint rather than a tactical instrument. It is the recognition that prosecutorial power, exercised inside a properly designed system, must be exercised with greater restraint than the system technically requires, precisely because the public legitimacy of the institution depends on it. And it is not only the institutions that need to learn this. The press needs to learn it, the political class needs to learn it, and the public needs to develop the patience that constitutional time requires.

Italy’s Mani Pulite generation had the tools and lacked the restraint. What came next was not institutional renewal but Berlusconi, and a generation of Italian political life shaped by the backlash against prosecutorial overreach. The lesson is available in the historical record. Whether Albania has read it is not yet clear.

This is the argument that needs to land, and it is not the one Bollino is making. He is asking whether Albanian justice has become Guantanamo. The honest answer is that it has not, that the comparison fails at the level of structure, and that asking the question this way costs the reform more than it costs the procedural failures it claims to address.

The Albanian justice reform is not a finished product. It is a constitutional architecture that requires institutional culture to make it work, and that culture is being built in real time, under political pressure, with mistakes accumulating that will need to be corrected through the appellate process and through the slow accretion of institutional habit. The defense of the reform is not the defense of every SPAK decision. It is the insistence that the corrections happen inside the system rather than against it, and the willingness to say, when necessary, that a specific decision was wrong without conceding that the institution that made it should not exist.

The reform is the floor. The ceiling is the institutional culture that has not yet been built, and may not be built without the kind of restraint that no Albanian institution, and no Albanian newsroom, has yet had the occasion to demonstrate at scale. The distance between floor and ceiling is where the argument lives. It is not the distance between Tirana and Guantanamo.