When the Constitutional Architecture Answers Back

The Tirana Examiner Legal Desk

The 25 May decision of the Constitutional Court, taken by a five-to-three majority of the eight sitting judges, is the most consequential ruling on pretrial detention of an elected official in the post-justice-reform period. It is also the second time within a single calendar year that the Constitutional Court has corrected a higher-instance decision affecting the same mayor. The earlier ruling, in January 2026, reinstated his mandate after a government act the Court characterised as constitutionally void. The current ruling annuls the Criminal Chamber of the High Court’s decision of 8 July 2025, on the security measure, for failure of reasoning on two specific grounds. Two corrections, two architectures, eight months apart. That is the institutional context within which the present assessment is offered.

The Legal Desk’s view is that the ruling is narrower than its supporters claim, wider than its detractors will concede, and more important than either reading captures.

I. What the Court did, with precision

The Constitutional Court partially upheld the appeal. It annulled the Criminal Chamber decision and remanded. It rejected, on the merits, two of the appellant’s substantive complaints, the right of defence and the reasonable suspicion threshold. It accepted, by majority, two grounds: the dignity and presumption of innocence complaint connected to the glass enclosure, and the proportionality complaint connected to the right to be elected. In both cases the acceptance is procedurally framed; the Court found that the High Court had failed to reply, in reasoned form, to grounds raised in the recourse. The Court did not order release. It did not pronounce on the substantive validity of the measure. It did not adjudicate guilt.

On the principle of reformatio in peius, the rule that the appellant’s position should not be worsened by his own appeal, the Court split four-four. Under Article 73(4) of the Organic Law, that count produces a formal rejection. The doctrinal question remains live, however, because an evenly divided bench at the highest level of constitutional review on the admission of new prosecution evidence at appellate review of a security measure is not a settled question. The next file that raises it will not arrive at a court that has resolved the matter.

This is the disposition. The framing in some Albanian outlets, that the Court ruled “in favour” of Veliaj five to three, is technically accurate as to the vote distribution but obscures the scope. The five-to-three majority is the majority on the partial acceptance, not on a full vindication of the appellant’s case.

II. The Venice Commission anchor

The single most consequential element of the ruling, in the Legal Desk’s reading, is the documented reliance on Venice Commission Opinion 1257/2025, adopted in Strasbourg on 24 October 2025 as a non country-specific report on the impact of prolonged pretrial detention of mayors on local democratic governance. The Opinion was triggered by a request from the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities concerning the situation in Türkiye, and specifically the prolonged detention of opposition mayors including the case of İstanbul. The Venice Commission chose, deliberately, to frame its report in general terms applicable to all member states of the Council of Europe.

The Albanian Constitutional Court has now incorporated that report into the domestic constitutional architecture. The Veliaj case appears to be the first constitutional adjudication in Europe to apply the Venice Commission’s October 2025 framework to a serving mayor, on the basis of the comparative record available to the Legal Desk at the time of writing. The legal parallel to İmamoğlu, which until now has been the work of analysts and editorial pages, is now part of the reasoned record of a national constitutional court.

This is not a small matter. The Venice Commission framework establishes that pretrial detention of mayors must be subject to strict proportionality review against the right to democratic representation, that the duration of the measure carries independent constitutional weight, and that suspension or removal of an elected official through criminal procedure short of conviction sits in structural tension with the principle that democratic mandates are resolved through electoral and judicial determination, not through administrative or prosecutorial discretion. The Albanian Constitutional Court has now told the High Court that this framework must be answered, on the record, in reasoned form.

III. The glass enclosure

The dignity ground accepted by the Court concerns the appellant’s placement in the glass enclosure during the fact-finding proceedings. The doctrinal background is the line of European Court of Human Rights cases beginning with Svinarenko and Slyadnev v. Russia in 2014, in which the Grand Chamber found that the use of metal cages in courtrooms breached Article 3 ECHR as a categorical matter, and subsequent decisions, including Yaroslav Belousov v. Russia and others, in which the use of glass cabins was assessed under a more contextual standard. The Strasbourg standard does not categorically forbid glass enclosures; it requires individualised, documented justification based on specific security risk, and it treats generalised or symbolic use as incompatible with the Convention.

The Albanian record on this point, in the Legal Desk’s reading, has not met that standard. In the GJKKO sessions of late April, the prosecution characterised the enclosure as “a glass structure” with conditions comparable to a five-star hotel; the judge intervened from the bench. That exchange entered the appellate record. The High Court did not address it. The Constitutional Court has now ordered that it be addressed. The remand requires the Criminal Chamber to produce reasoning that would survive Strasbourg review. That is a meaningfully higher bar than the Chamber discharged in July 2025.

IV. The proportionality ground and the right to be elected

The second accepted ground is the constitutional one with the longest tail. The Court found that the High Court failed to provide reasoned analysis of the proportionality complaint in relation to Article 45 of the Albanian Constitution, the right to be elected. The acceptance is narrow as to procedural form, the High Court did not reply, but the substance of what the High Court must now reply to is the structural question the Legal Desk identified in March: the use of pretrial detention to produce, in practice, what the Albanian legal order does not authorise in form, namely the administrative suspension of an elected mayor pending criminal proceedings.

The proportionality question on remand will require the Criminal Chamber to weigh the security measure not only against the right to personal liberty under Article 27, which is the standard analysis under Article 5 ECHR, but also against the right to democratic participation under Article 45 and the corresponding rights of the electorate that voted the appellant into office. The Venice Commission framework is the doctrinal scaffolding the Chamber will be expected to use. The duration of the measure, by 25 May 2026 in excess of fifteen months, becomes an aggravating factor in the proportionality calculation rather than a neutral background fact.

V. What the Court did not do, and why it matters

The Court did not accept the complaint on insufficient time for the defence to study the case file. That ground was rejected as unfounded. The Court did not accept the complaint that the reasoning of the lower courts breached the presumption of innocence through the language used. That ground was also rejected. The substantive foundation of the measure, the reasonable suspicion threshold based on evidence, was held to have been met.

Reporting that frames the ruling as a vindication of Veliaj’s full constitutional case is inaccurate and should be corrected. The Court has not said the measure was wrong; it has said the highest court of ordinary jurisdiction did not adequately explain why the measure was right on the dignity and proportionality grounds raised on recourse. That distinction is the entire shape of the ruling, and the Legal Desk does not consider it useful to blur it.

VI. The 28 May convergence

The procedural calendar produces a convergence the institutional system will need to manage carefully. On 28 May, three days after the constitutional ruling, the High Court is scheduled to hear the appellant’s separate recourse seeking substitution of the security measure with bail or with a reporting obligation. That recourse was filed on 6 May, two days after the Joint Chambers of the High Court issued the Begtash Zeneli decision modifying the 2011 unifying doctrine on pretrial detention.

The Begtash Zeneli decision, which the Legal Desk analysed in early May, recalibrated the doctrinal standard to require, on the record, that “arrest në burg” be treated as the measure of last resort, that alternatives be substantively analysed before imposition, and that the prosecution bear the burden of justifying the extreme measure in individualised terms. The 28 May hearing is the first real test of how that revised standard applies to a high-profile case. It will now be conducted under the additional weight of the Constitutional Court’s remand on the parallel file.

The Criminal Chamber of the High Court is therefore looking at two convergent obligations within a single week: a remand from the Constitutional Court requiring reasoned engagement with dignity, proportionality, and the right to be elected; and an inaugural application of the Joint Chambers’ modified doctrine on pretrial detention to the case that filed it first. Whatever the Chamber decides, it will be read against both standards.

The practical stakes can be stated plainly. The mayor of the capital, in pretrial detention for more than fifteen months, has obtained a constitutional ruling that requires the highest court of ordinary jurisdiction to explain itself on dignity and on democratic representation, and that ruling arrives three days before that same court will apply a newly modified doctrine to the same case. Whatever happens in the next week will be read as the operative meaning of the post-reform architecture.

VII. The political reaction, and why it should be reported carefully

The ruling has already been characterised by the leader of the Opportunity Party, Agron Shehaj, as evidence that “Rama used the Constitutional Court as a weapon against SPAK.” That framing is not new in Albanian political discourse, and it is not, on the record of the 25 May ruling itself, supportable. The Constitutional Court rejected two of the appellant’s four constitutional grounds. It accepted two on a procedural reasoning basis. It split evenly on a fifth. The institutional posture of the Court, on this ruling, is not that of a court bent toward a defendant; it is that of a court that has required the rest of the architecture to meet the constitutional standard the Constitution imposes.

The Legal Desk does not consider political characterisations of the Court’s independence to be improved by their volume. The proper response to a constitutional ruling that one finds inconvenient is to address it on its reasoning, not to allege its motive. The Court will publish its full reasoned decision within the statutory deadline. That text, not the political reaction to its summary, is the document on which institutional credibility will be assessed.

It should also be noted that the framing of the ruling as the Prime Minister using the Court “against SPAK” sits in tension with a parallel and equally important observation: SPAK retains the case, the prosecution stands, GJKKO proceedings continue, and the substantive trial will be determined on the merits. The Constitutional Court has not interfered with the prosecution; it has interfered with the reasoning of the High Court on the security measure. The conflation of those two things, in either direction, produces incoherent analysis.

VIII. The institutional reading, in summary

The Albanian constitutional architecture, after the 2016 reform, was designed to produce exactly this kind of ruling: the Constitutional Court reviews the reasoning of the highest court of ordinary jurisdiction against the Constitution, identifies where the reasoning falls short, requires it to be repaired, and does not substitute its own judgment on the merits. That is what the Court did on 25 May. The system is working as it was designed to work.

The fact that the ruling benefits a defendant who is the sitting mayor of the capital, whose political alignment is government-friendly, and whose trial is the most politically charged proceeding in the country, is not a reason to discount the ruling. It is the reason the constitutional architecture exists. The test of a constitutional court is whether it produces rulings against power when the law requires; the Court has done that already in the Balluku immunity-adjacent reasoning, and in earlier rulings concerning executive overreach. The test in this case is whether it can produce a ruling that benefits a defendant whose case is politically charged without losing institutional credibility. The Legal Desk’s view is that the 25 May ruling, on its narrow grounds, meets that test.

The harder test is what follows. The Criminal Chamber of the High Court must now produce, in reasoned form, a response to the dignity ground, the proportionality ground, and the Venice Commission framework. If that response is substantive, the architecture has been audited and reinforced. If it is perfunctory, the architecture has been signalled and ignored, and the Constitutional Court will face the question whether to escalate.

The Legal Desk will return when the High Court’s remand decision is published, and again when the full reasoned decision of the Constitutional Court is available. The four-four split on reformatio in peius will require separate analysis. So will the Venice Commission Opinion 1257/2025, which now sits, by virtue of this ruling, inside Albanian constitutional jurisprudence.

— The Legal Desk

Erion Veliaj is presumed innocent until a final judicial decision establishes otherwise. The comparative claim regarding the application of Venice Commission Opinion 1257/2025 by national constitutional courts reflects the documentary record available to the Legal Desk at the time of writing; the Desk will revise the framing if a prior incorporation is identified.