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The killers of justice celebrate the tenth anniversary of the corpse

2026-07-27 15:43:26Pikëpamje SHKRUAR NGA DORIAN MATLIJA
Dorian Matlija

– Reply to the Fatmir Xhafa-style celebration of an experiment that killed citizens' rights and professionals' craft

After 10 years of justice reform, there is nothing to celebrate. There is no "decade that changed the state" as Fatmir Xhafa mocks in an article published by all the government media outlets. There is, instead, a decade that dismantled justice, emptied the courts, destroyed the professional hierarchy, humiliated the legal profession, multiplied the time and cost of every process and left the citizen without any place to truly defend his rights.

All the failures of the reform were warned by many of us from the first day the idea was conceived.

Fatmir Xhafaj can write as much as he wants about a “state-building project,” a “European passport,” the “end of impunity,” and the “decade of consolidation.” For those of us who live every day among files, courtrooms, endless delays, unreasonable decisions, and clients who grow old waiting, these words are not simply lines of propaganda.

But, they are the biggest joke in broad daylight.

The Justice Reform was a project of the European Union, with American political, technical and financial support. It was not simply designed by a few Albanian lawyers inspired by the desire for statehood. It was imposed as an international operation, sold as a recipe for salvation and defended with such pressure that any critic was immediately declared an enemy of justice, a defender of corruption or an opponent of integration.

Now, the same supporters of the reform dare not recommend it in other countries. Europe would no longer dare to apply this experiment in its own country, to empty the courts in a few years, to leave the highest courts without a quorum, to dismiss hundreds of professional magistrates without having replacements ready, and then to ask citizens to wait patiently until the experiment produces new magistrates, after the grass has sprouted for a couple of generations of citizens.

In Albania, they did it. And they will never admit what they did.

Don't expect the European Union to come out tomorrow and say: "Forgive us, our project killed Albanian justice." It will never say that. They have invested millions of euros, thousands of hours of expertise, political statements, ambassadorial names, institutional reputation and ten years of propaganda. Admitting the failure of the reform would be admitting their failure.

That is why they use the language of diplomatic embalming. They do not say that the courts are dead, but they say that there are “continuous challenges”. They do not say that citizens do not receive justice, but they say that “efficiency remains limited”. They do not say that the profession of professionals has been destroyed, but they say that “additional capacities are needed”. They do not say that the appeal has turned into a graveyard of files, but they say that “the disposal time remains high”.

The Council of Europe has calculated that, for 2024, the theoretical time needed to process civil and commercial cases at second instance was 5,496 days.

Fifteen years on appeal…

For administrative appeals: 3,276 days. In other words, about nine years. And the numbers are getting worse every day. In the years to come, if this country and the EU do not accept failure and give up, this number will undoubtedly increase by another 15 or 20 years.

Well, fifteen years on a trial is not just a “challenge.” Fifteen years is a total denial of justice. Fifteen years is a state without courts for an entire generation of people.

No right exists without a court to protect the right.
You can write in the Constitution all you want that property is guaranteed. But where will you protect property? You can write that the state must compensate the citizen when it causes damage. When will you receive the compensation? You can put twenty articles in the contract about penalties, guarantees, deadlines and liability. Who will enforce them?

Notaries laugh today when the swindlers try to draft sophisticated contracts and want to add a special clause for their protection. “Where will you defend this clause?” they ask. “In which court?” “When?” “When the grass grows on you?”

And they are right. A legal norm without a court is simply a blot of printer ink on paper. A contract without a functioning court is reduced to an honorable agreement between the parties, which is implemented only if both parties wish. Even a Constitution without a court is a propaganda pamphlet. A right that is defended after fifteen or thirty years, if the case is returned for retrial, is no longer right. It is an epitaph that the court places on the citizen’s grave: “You were right, man, but the state did not have time to say it while you were alive.”

Lawyers' profession was killed.
Thousands of professionals know full well what has happened. Lawyers today are not crying because "they have no one left to corrupt." They are not crying for the corrupt who left. They are not demanding the return of the old system. But they are crying for the death of the very concept of the judicial process.

A lawyer over 50 today thinks twice before taking on a new civil, property or administrative case. Not because he has no work. But because he knows that the case may not be concluded during his professional life. The lawyer may retire while the file is still on appeal. He may die while the recourse is still on the shelf of the Supreme Court. He may leave the case to a younger colleague, who will leave it to someone else, while the client will leave it to his heirs.

Once upon a time, a lawyer could tell a client, "This case is difficult, but you're right and we'll fight it." Today, he must say, "You're right, but it's unknown if you'll be alive when the court accepts it."

Well, this is no longer a legal profession. It has become a psychological support service during the agony.

Lawyers today, instead of strategies to win the case, develop strategies to keep the client alive financially and psychologically during the process. They must explain to him why the hearing was postponed for another six months, why the judge has not yet announced the decision after a year, why the file has not reached the appeals court, why the appeals court is still reviewing cases registered almost ten years ago. They must explain to him why the recourse can wait another five years, only for the Supreme Court to dismiss it with a standard paragraph of non-appeal.

And the client, rightly, asks, "What am I paying for? What am I fighting for?"

Today, 2018 appeals are being heard, while today's appeals could go beyond 2045.

In many appellate divisions, the court's public calendar still shows 2026 appeals that date back to 2018. If each year of appeals takes roughly three calendar years to consume, do the math. Appeals filed today will not be heard next year, or even in 2030. At this rate, they could go beyond 2045.

Ridicule or not?

Imagine, a 50-year-old man today starts a case. The court can review it with a final decision when he is about 70 years old. He was lucky that the case was not sent back to him for retrial. A 67-year-old man seeks a pension. He would be 85 years old and counting when the appeal reached his file. A child is born today into a family with a property conflict. He can become a parent himself before the court decides who owns the property.

And we should celebrate because SPAK arrested a minister. Let's enjoy SPAK now. Let's have a ceremony. Let's blow out the ten-year anniversary candles on the files of the people who died waiting.

The court decides on childhood after childhood is over
Today you see decisions to leave a child for upbringing and education with one parent, when the child has already grown up. The court decides with whom a child who is no longer a child should live. The relationship with one parent has been destroyed. The formative years have passed. The psychological damage has been done. The family has been torn apart. Then the court comes and declares who was right ten years ago.

What did he fix? Nothing. He just documented the corpse of a family relationship.

I see property cases that continue, while the other party has legalized the object, registered it, sold it, rebuilt it, or created a new chain of legal relationships on it. When the decision comes, the property for which the trial was initiated exists only in old photographs in the file. I see compensation trials that are won after money has lost its purchasing power several times. The citizen wins on paper and loses in reality. When the process began, he could have bought an apartment with that amount. When it ends, he can buy a parking space for a lot more.

I see tender trials that continue when the tender has been implemented, the money has been paid, the facility has been consumed, the officials have left, and it has been forgotten who was the minister when the process began. The court controls the legality of a competition that no longer has a competitor, a contract, or an effect.

I see pensioners winning their lawsuits after they've died. Justice gives rights to their heirs while denying them to their owners.

I see trials in the courts for seeking information and documents from journalists, since 2013-2014. What use would that information be for today? For personal archives?

Is this reformed justice? The one that gives you the right after you no longer need it?

The road to Strasbourg has become a journey beyond human life.
It is often said that if Albanian courts make mistakes, Strasbourg exists. Let's do the math. Five years of first instance. Ten or fifteen years of appeal. Another five years of the Supreme Court. Add another year of the Constitutional Court, in the most optimistic case. A few more years in the Strasbourg Court. That court finds the violation and says that the case must be repaired in Albania. You go back to the Constitutional Court. Another year has passed. The Constitutional Court returns it to the Supreme Court. Another five years are added. The Supreme Court returns it to appeal. Here, another five are added at the minimum, since it is a retrial. Then the appeal repairs the mistake that a post-reform judge made when you were thirty years old. How long do you have to live to see this justice? Eighty years after the start of the trial? A hundred? What if the Supreme Court ruins the country and returns the case to zero again? How many generations of lawyers must you agree with? How many times must you pay for a case study? How many times must you explain the case to a new lawyer, after the previous one has retired or died, or simply gotten tired? How much should a right that requires almost lifelong legal representation cost?

The right to Strasbourg, under these conditions, is an illusion for the rich, the young, and the long-lived. For others, it is a road that ends in the cemetery before reaching France.

Corruption did not disappear. It became more expensive.
The reform was sold with the slogan that it would eliminate corruption in the judiciary. Corruption did not disappear, but became stronger, more closed, and more dangerous. And, according to what is being said among professionals and parties, it became much more expensive.

Previously, corruption was mainly aimed at the outcome of the case, while today it is also paid to bring the date closer. It is paid so that the file does not lie dormant for years. It is paid for procedural actions that should have been routine.

The reform created the new product of the corruption market: time. When the state makes judicial time artificially scarce, time begins to sell dearly. When a file can be lost in storage for a decade, its resurfacing comes at a high price.

This is the simplest economic mechanism. The reform created the shortage, the shortage created the market, and the market created new corruption. Not to mention the security measures, which are a long conversation in themselves. It doesn't matter how many asset declarations are checked, if the citizen is convinced that without intervention he can't even reach the door of the court. It doesn't matter how many magistrates were dismissed, if the remaining corruption demands prices that only the rich and powerful can pay.

In the old system, justice was corrupt. In the new system, justice is corrupt, incompetent, and inaccessible. This is the “progress” of reform.

Today's judges are overworked, demotivated and often terribly weak.
Some of today's judges are professionally incompetent. They not only make mistakes, but they do not even know basic concepts. They do not understand the subject matter of the lawsuit. They do not individualize criminal liability. They do not explain why they do not agree with the parties' claims. They often do not even read the file. They take a ready-made model, change the names and produce the decision, which is usually written by secretaries. There are decisions that make you doubt whether the author ever graduated from law school, let alone the Magistrate's School.

There are also judges who have lost their humanity. They do not look you in the eye, they do not listen to the party, they treat the lawyer as an inconvenience, they treat the citizen as a sequential file number. They speak with contempt, they postpone dates without explanation and they reason as if after a decision there were no human lives, families, property at risk, troubles or life destinies. Some behave this way because they know that no one will really check them in time. Their mistake can be discovered at least after ten years or more, when the interest of the case has died with the owner, or has been abandoned.

Some behave like this because they no longer have motivation. They have thousands of files on their shoulders. They only receive insults, tensions, accusations and pressure, because this is how the reform was prepared, on the premise that judges are misery. Judges work in institutions without staff, without space, without conditions, without human resources to cope with the load. The reform closed 18 courts and reduced their total number from 38 to 20, concentrating all appeals in a single court.

Some have become insensitive to survive. Some are no longer afraid of professional control. Some know enough. But the citizen does not care about the reason. He is destroyed by the case the same way. An overloaded judge, an unmotivated judge and an incompetent judge produce the same result, which is a decision that kills the right and you have nowhere to cry because the next court is at least 10 years away in time.

Vetting bodies and the mediocrity that judged professionalism
Vetting bodies were presented as the temple of integrity and professionalism. In many cases, they were a group of people with questionable training, endowed with absolute power over the career, dignity and life of magistrates. They judged whether a judge was professionally competent. Those who often had never written a single decision in their life. Those who had never administered a complex process. Those who had never borne the responsibility of judicial decision-making. Those who knew how to do arithmetic calculations on asset declarations and call this justice. Even judges in open violation of the law were appointed to the Special Appeals Chamber.

This is the pure image of Albanian vetting, where illegality judged legality and incompetence certified professionalism. Many judges were dismissed in violation of the law, while some of those confirmed in office later became the subject of serious criminal investigations.

Well, this process didn't clean with a scalpel, but it did with a revolutionary axe. And when you strike with an axe, you don't just remove the rotten part, you also cut the nerves, vessels, and organs that keep the body alive.

The Supreme Court is not delivering justice. It is simply destroying the stock.
They tell us that the Supreme Court has reduced the number of backlogged files. Yes, yes, it has definitely reduced it. If you add a standard rejection decision every ten minutes, every stock will decrease. Take the appeal, write that it "does not contain any of the reasons provided for by law". Hang on to the arguments. Do not explain why the violation does not exist. Do not correct the absurd appeal decision. Do not bear any responsibility for the development of jurisprudence. Put your signature at the end. And behold, the file is out of the statistics. Come on, next time!

In 2025, the Supreme Court reported thousands of decisions and a significant reduction in the backlog. But the number of decisions does not indicate whether cases were actually considered. It only indicates how many files were removed from the registry.

There is a faster way to reduce the stock. Burn it in the fire. Why bother with other methods in vain? Justice is not measured by the speed of burning the file, but by the quality of decision-making. But, here, the Supreme Court, under pressure to appear as if the reform did not kill justice, is rushing and making fun of jurisprudence. Principles built over decades are suddenly overturned. Clear legal concepts are blurred. Legal sciences are being rewritten from scratch, but backwards. Lower courts no longer know which standard to follow. Lawyers cannot give clients reliable advice. One panel says one thing. Another does the opposite. Even the same panel, on the same issue, speaks once as Zeqo's mother and the second time as Zeqo's mother-in-law. The decision is called "development of practice", when in fact it only develops uncertainty. And when the Supreme Court makes a mistake, who will correct it? The Constitutional Court in a few years? Strasbourg in a decade? What about the case? What about the property? What about the family? What about the pensioner? What about life? These are over.

SPAK makes a television spectacle of beheadings, but does not build justice
SPAK is the illuminated facade of this dilapidated justice building. The televisions show the arrest. They show the police van. But they do not show the useless evidence. They show the officer who enters custody, but they do not show the standard justification for the security measure. They only show how many heads were cut off and how many others are in line before the guillotine.

They don't show how many accusations are poorly individualized, how many wiretaps are taken out of context, how many connections are built on assumptions, and how many defense rights are treated as annoying obstacles, like when the defendant asks for his file and no one gives it to him.

SPAK is the most powerful body of the Albanian state and at the same time the body where disrespect for the law and human rights is more easily tolerated in the name of political results. They say that it is “fighting corruption”, as if this sentence is enough to repeal the entire Criminal Procedure Code. As if it were normal that corruption is fought by violating the law. As if human rights were a luxury for people the public does not like. Arrest has become a preliminary sentence. Detention in evidence of guilt. Press release in a judicial decision. The file may be weak, but the arrest has done its job, because the person has been publicly destroyed, has lost his job, reputation and freedom. When innocence comes after five or ten years, who will give it back to him? Nobody.

It is enough for television to get the footage, politics to get the spectacle, and the internationals to get the success story. The defendant is left to wait, just like those other cowards who wait a lifetime for property, divorce, or pension trials.

SPAK controls the judge who should control SPAK
In theory, the judge controls the prosecutor. In reformed Albania, the prosecutor has the power to investigate the judge he should control. The judge decides on the arrest, search, wiretapping and seizure requested by SPAK, knowing that SPAK also has criminal jurisdiction over him.

Let's leave the hypocrisy aside. What kind of balance of power is this? How can the judge be the fearless controller of the prosecution, when the prosecution in front of him can control his property, communications, contacts and entire life? There is no need for the prosecutor to call the judge. The architecture of fear itself is enough. The judge no longer just asks whether the prosecution has proven the claim, but in a corner of his mind he asks what will happen to me if I dismiss it?

This is a subversion of the rule of law. The court should be the power that sets the limits of the prosecution. When the court feels controlled by the prosecution, we do not have criminal justice. We have a prosecutor's state. We have such a strong prosecutor's state that even the Constitutional Court was put under surveillance just because it had not issued a decision within 30 days.

The majority and the government have no interest in reviving the judiciary.
The executive branch and the deputies of the majority that it subordinates (in this overthrown state of ours) have no interest in this system being regulated. The government is stronger when the court is dead. The administration destroys your property today. You win after fifteen years or more. The government fires you today. You get the right when your career is over. The state takes your money today. You do what you want and get compensation when the money has lost its value altogether. The authority gives the tender to your competitor today. The court declares it illegal after the contract has been implemented, the profit has been taken and it has even been forgotten who the director or minister of the time was.

The government consumes illegality immediately. While the citizen makes the decision when the illegality has produced all the effects. Always if it takes a positive place, because you can also make a negative decision after 20 years.

For the government, this system is not a failure. It is an ideal system. The government can do whatever it wants, because judicial control will come in a different political era, or it will not come at all. Even when it comes, the minister who signed the act may no longer be a minister. The government may have changed three times. There is no accountability. Just a delayed decision that the taxpayer pays for.

The opposition is apathetic and only reacts when SPAK endangers its leader.
It seems as if the opposition does not really care about the interests of that pensioner who dies before the trial is over, or the interests of that child who grows up with a parent without a court decision, etc. It seems as if it only cares about one question: Will SPAK arrest its leader? If SPAK hits its opponent, it is a hero. If it approaches its leader, it is a criminal organization. The entire debate about justice has been reduced to the criminal problems of politicians. While justice for the ordinary citizen has disappeared from every political program.

The small forces are even worse. They flatter themselves about the reform to look good in front of the international community. They dare not say that the embassy project has corrupted the system. They think that loyalty to the reform is a Western certificate. And so, the entire political class is silent. Each for their own reason.

The people see the handcuffs and do not see the cemetery.
Most of the public still does not understand what has happened to them. In the news they see an arrested minister, a mayor, a former president, they see police, cars, prison doors and thick files. And the citizen thinks that justice is finally working… They do not see the thousands of ordinary people waiting for a system that they have not yet understood has given up its soul.

Even those who have more information, because they have their own courts, sense the catastrophe, but they do not understand the cause. They blame their judge. Sometimes rightly so. But they do not understand that their judge is also placed in a machine designed for failure. And so the people curse the judge. The judge curses the workload. The lawyer curses the system. The client curses the lawyer. Politics applauds SPAK. Internationals publish the next report on “progress”. And the reform continues to eat away at life.

A national emergency should be declared.
This is no longer a topic for conferences or anniversaries. It is no longer a topic for tables with simultaneous translation, coffee, cookies, and ambassadors congratulating each other.

It is a national emergency. The Albanian state no longer guarantees effective protection of rights. No right really exists when you have to wait a minimum of fifteen years for the court to recognize it with a final decision. No contract is valid when the party violating it knows that the decision will come after twenty years. No administration is controlled when its illegal act produces all the effects long before the decision. No Supreme Court fulfills its function by industrially producing standard rejections. No reform can be called a success when a generation of lawyers no longer accepts to start cases that will end after they have died or retired. This system should not be “consolidated”. You cannot fix a corpse by adjusting its tie.

It must be publicly acknowledged that the reform killed justice. A full audit of its consequences is needed. The number of judges must be urgently increased. The judicial map must be reopened. The way the stock is managed must be changed. The quality of rejection decisions must be controlled. The court must be restored to the prosecutor's office. The use of arrest as propaganda must be stopped. The new corruption that trades time, date, order and procedural action must be investigated. The judge must be protected from inhumane burdens and the citizen from incompetent judges. But before anything else, the truth must be told.

Not “we still have challenges”, “reform takes time”, “the second decade will bring consolidation”, or “the two-year plan will bring prosperity”. Ten years is enough time to see the corpse. Albanian justice is not in transition, or in difficulty. It is in clinical death.

That's why it's a great shame and a great mockery when someone like Fatmir Xhafa has the impudence to tell us that this decade should be celebrated... What should we celebrate? That expression of your boss's "Better an empty cradle than the devil inside"? Imagine leaving the houses in the neighborhood without toilets, and after 10 years celebrating the fact that everyone has filled all the rooms of the houses waiting for their turn to go to the only toilet in the entire neighborhood...

This is not Albania's European passport. It is simply the declaration of the death certificate of justice. And on it is the signature of all those who designed it, implemented it, applauded it, and today, the lack of courage to admit what they did to this country, they have replaced it with the courage to mock informed citizens.

The killers of justice celebrate the tenth anniversary of the corpse


Në përputhje me standarded JTI

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