On September 15, Albania’s Supreme Court allowed for the continued detention of Tirana Mayor Erion Veliaj. Mayor since 2015, Veliaj has now spent more than 19 months in custody without a conviction. The Albania’s Constitutional Court found the Supreme Court’s justifications for that detention constitutionally inadequate this summer, when it annulled the lower court’s ruling entirely for failing to consider less restrictive alternatives or the fact that Veliaj remains an elected official.
The Supreme Court’s answer, in the end, was to continue his detention, anyway. It has yet to provide its reasoning. That is where a decade of Western-backed “judicial reform” in Albania has landed: a prosecutorial system powerful enough to outlast two rebukes from the country’s own constitutional judges.
It didn’t start this way. In 2016, Washington and Brussels pushed Albania to create SPAK — the Special Structure against Corruption and Organized Crime — as an independent, insulated body empowered to go after corrupt officials and organized crime networks that had burrowed into state institutions. The theory, as always with this kind of technocratic engineering, was that more institutional power, wielded by the right people, would produce more rule of law. Vet the judges. Purge the corrupt ones. Build a prosecutorial machine strong enough to finally hold the powerful accountable.
Give the reformers this much: the vetting process was not toothless. More than half of the judges and prosecutors who went through it were dismissed for unexplained wealth or ties to organized crime, or quit rather than face the process, according to the State Department’s own account. That is a genuine accomplishment, and it’s worth saying so plainly rather than pretending the whole project was hollow from the start.
But purging bad judges is not the same as building a system bound by law, and a decade on, the machine SPAK built increasingly looks like the thing it was supposed to replace: powerful, opaque, and answerable to no one. The court backlog it was supposed to help clear has instead exploded — from roughly 16,000 pending cases to an estimated 200,000. Ordinary Albanians can now wait 15 years for a ruling. And more than half the country’s prison population sits in pre-trial detention — one of the highest rates in Europe — a tool the European Convention on Human Rights says should be reserved for genuine flight risk or danger to the public, not deployed as a default holding pattern.
More troubling still is the use of pre-trial detention to override the will of voters, as critics argue has happened in the case of Veliaj. SPAK arrested him in February 2025 on corruption and money-laundering charges; he has denied wrongdoing throughout. Last September, the Tirana Municipal Council used his detention as grounds to try to remove him from office altogether — before any conviction, effectively letting a prosecutorial action do what the ballot box hadn’t. The Constitutional Court of Albania overturned the Council’s dismissal.
At the outset of the case, SPAK denied Veliaj access to about 60,000 pages of evidence. Separately, two Constitutional Court judges objected to the conditions in which he was held during hearings, saying that keeping him in a glass enclosure was degrading. And one concurring Constitutional Court opinion went further than the majority, concluding the evidence never even established the reasonable suspicion required to justify holding him in the first place. Even a sitting Member of the European Parliament — hardly a natural skeptic of Brussels-backed institutions — has publicly asked whether 18 months of pre-trial detention is still “strictly necessary.”
This is what happens when an agency built to be unaccountable to politics ends up unaccountable to law as well. And the costs aren’t confined to courtroom drama. Foreign investors read this pattern for what it is. The State Department’s own 2025 Investment Climate Statement — which credits Albania with a genuinely improved Corruption Perceptions Index score, up from 37 to 42, and rising U.S. investment stock, from $300 million to $382 million in a single year — still describes Albania as a difficult place to do business, citing corruption in procurement, an oversized informal economy, and weak contract enforcement. An economy cannot out-market a justice system that detains people first and justifies it later.
None of this argues for going soft on corruption; Albania has earned its reputation the hard way. But an anti-corruption apparatus that answers to no one, moves at its own pace, and treats due process as optional isn’t rule of law — it’s just a different address for the same old discretionary power. Real reform was supposed to replace that. Nineteen months into Veliaj’s detention, it’s fair to ask whether it has.
