The Same Result. Now the Reasons Are Owed.

The High Court kept Erion Veliaj in custody on Tuesday. The Constitutional Court never said it could not. It said the court had to explain why, and that explanation is now the only document that matters.

Renada Bici (Legal Desk)

On 15 September the Penal College of the High Court, Sandër Simoni presiding as rapporteur with Genti Shala and Valbon Çekrezi, sat in chambers and upheld decision no. 13 of 13 March 2025 of the Special Appeal Court, the ruling that confirmed “arrest në burg” for the mayor of Tirana. The legal basis is Article 441(1)(e) of the Criminal Procedure Code, the provision that lets the High Court leave an appellate judgment in force. What the court published was the dispositive alone, a single paragraph stating the result. Under Article 448/1(4), a criminal judgment announced in summary form is ordinarily reasoned within sixty days; the full written judgment, with the reasons behind Tuesday’s result, is still to come.

The defence called the outcome scandalous and said the college had “left in force a decision annulled by the Constitutional Court”. That is not what happened. The Constitutional Court’s judgment no. 57 of 25 May annulled one decision only: the High Court’s own ruling of 8 July 2025. The Appeal Court decision of March 2025 was never touched. The file went back so the High Court could decide again, and a court deciding again may reach the same result. What it may not do is reach it the same way.

Judgment no. 57 is a narrower document than either side has described it. The Constitutional Court rejected the claim that there was no reasonable suspicion; paragraph 91 says an impartial observer would find grounds. It rejected the presumption-of-innocence claim, the effective-defence claim, and, on a 4-3-1 division that produced no majority, the claim on new evidence admitted at appeal. It quashed the High Court’s ruling for two omissions. The first: Veliaj had argued that the risks cited against him were generic, that a property guarantee combined with other restrictions was never seriously examined, and that detention bears on a mandate won by direct election under Article 45 of the Constitution. The High Court had endorsed the Appeal Court’s reasoning without giving those arguments the separate constitutional answer they required. The second: the High Court said nothing about Veliaj being held behind glass in the courtroom.

The vote was 5-3. Four of the five judges in the majority (Papajorgji, Bejtja, Beci, Ibrahimi) added a parallel opinion saying they would have found the detention itself disproportionate, since decision no. 66 of November 2025 had restored Veliaj’s mandate and the measure has made it impossible to exercise. Judge Bejtja alone found no reasonable suspicion. Judges Xhaferllari and Semini found a violation of dignity on the glass cage but would have left the detention orders standing. Judge Vokshi would have dismissed everything, and his dissent gives the High Court its script: the special courts, he wrote, had already reasoned in the individualised way the law requires.

That claim will be tested against a standard the High Court set for itself. On 4 May the Joint Colleges, sixteen judges under President Sadushi, revised the 2011 unifying practice on custody. Detention in prison is exceptional; it cannot rest solely or mainly on the gravity of the offence or the sentence range; and courts must examine less restrictive measures and state, on the facts, why each is insufficient. Two days later Veliaj filed a recourse invoking exactly that standard, asking for a property guarantee or a reporting obligation. On 28 May a different panel of the same court, Albana Boksi with Sokol Binaj and Genti Shala, refused it, three days after the Constitutional Court had voted judgment no. 57 and five weeks before that judgment was published. Its written reasons are not in the public record. Tuesday’s ruling was therefore the second time since May that the High Court has kept Veliaj in prison under a doctrine that requires it to say why prison and nothing less.

The facts have also moved since March 2025. Veliaj was detained on 10 February 2025. He was notified of the conclusion of the preliminary investigation on 23 July 2025; SPAK sent the case for trial on 10 September 2025; the special court committed it on 9 February 2026 on thirteen counts, and the merits hearing opened on 9 March. The strongest ground in the original orders was the risk of tampering with evidence during a live investigation, with witnesses among the mayor’s subordinates. Nineteen months on, with the file closed and the witnesses listed for trial, that ground carries less weight on its own terms, and the written reasons, when they come, will have to say what replaces it.

Veliaj remains, in law, mayor of Tirana. He is presumed innocent. The trial continues. What the High Court has not yet shown is the one thing it was sent the file back to show.