Two respected international law firms, New York’s Kasowitz Benson Torres and London’s Mishcon de Reya, have published two separate reports (one in June, an updated version in October) that read like a checklist of everything that can go wrong when anti-corruption zeal collides with basic rights. Excessive detention, delayed indictments, bail refusals that barely bother to explain themselves, wildly unequal treatment of co-defendants, restricted access to evidence — the list is long and depressing. Their conclusion is measured but brutal: the case against Veliaj shows clear signs of political motivation and falls well short of European standards.

They are not the only ones saying it. Alastair Campbell, hardly a natural cheerleader for centre-right Balkan mayors, wrote in his New European diary that holding someone for months without charge “is not something that should happen in a country knocking on the door of the European Union”. Istanbul’s Ekrem İmamoğlu, himself no stranger to politically timed court cases, sent Veliaj a public letter of solidarity from his own house arrest, pointing out the uncomfortable parallels across the region.

Even the usually cautious Venice Commission has reminded everyone, in language that is hard to misinterpret, that keeping elected mayors locked up for extended periods without trial undermines the very idea of democratic representation.

Veliaj’s story is worth pausing on. A civil-society activist turned mayor, he won three consecutive elections with margins that most European politicians can only dream of. Skanderbeg Square pedestrianized, the Lana river cleaned up, a proper bicycle network, 24-hour water supply in a city that used to ration it for a few hours a day. The transformation was visible enough to win international prizes and genuine affection from many Tirana residents. He was routinely talked about as Edi Rama’s logical successor whenever the prime minister finally decided to move on.

Then came SPAK, the Special Structure Against Corruption and Organized Crime, with allegations of passive corruption tied to municipal contracts – prompted by an anonymous tip-off. Veliaj insists the accusations are baseless, the product of a polarized political climate in which the ruling Socialists and the opposition Democrats have spent years trying to jail each other’s champions.

What followed was a judicial sequence that would raise eyebrows anywhere on the continent. Arrest in February, no indictment until July, seventeen failed bail applications, and eighteen co-defendants of whom seventeen are now free on relatively light conditions while the mayor himself remains inside. In November the Constitutional Court stepped in and ruled that the Tirana Municipal Council had acted unconstitutionally when it stripped him of his mandate; a rare victory. Yet even after that decision, SPAK reportedly blocked him from attending council meetings, turning a theoretical reinstatement into a practical suspension.

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The EU’s own 2025 Enlargement Report on Albania tells the tale in diplomatic language: yes, progress on vetting judges and on paper reforms, but “serious concerns” remain about prolonged pre-trial detention, inconsistent prosecutorial standards, and declining public trust in the judiciary. Brussels keeps the accession train moving as the Western Balkans are strategically too important to stall, but the Veliaj file is now sitting in too many inboxes in Brussels for comfort.

And now, voices from across the Atlantic are joining the chorus. At a U.S. House Foreign Affairs subcommittee hearing titled "Flashpoint: A Path Toward Stability in the Western Balkans" just yesterday – December 2, 2025 – Republican Congressman Keith Self, the Europe chair, laid out a sobering assessment of Albania’s decade-old justice reforms – reforms that Washington itself helped bankroll. “The United States has long supported efforts to build an independent, incredible judiciary in Albania,” Self said. “After ten years of implementation, however, it is appropriate to reexamine whether justice reform is functioning as intended and delivering impartial justice for the Albanian people. It should be concerning to all that the national case backlog has expanded from roughly 16,000 cases at the start of the reform to an estimated 200,000 today, leaving citizens waiting 8 to 15 years to receive a final ruling. Such delays undermine the rule of law, public trust and due process.”

Coming amid broader worries about ethnic tensions, Russian meddling and economic stagnation in the region, Self’s remarks feel like a quiet wake-up call: even America’s patience has limits.

SPAK itself is not a cartoon villain. It was set up in 2019 with generous EU and American help precisely because Albania needed a body capable of taking on the country’s toxic mix of political corruption and organized crime. It has delivered results: drug gangs dismantled, crooked judges removed, millions in assets seized.

But the Veliaj case, like the earlier ones against former president Ilir Meta or the ethnic-Greek mayor Fredi Beleri, exposes the downside of creating a prosecutor with sweeping powers and very little day-to-day accountability. When the institution’s success is measured largely by the number of high-profile scalps it can display to international partners, the temptation to go after the biggest names available – regardless of the strength of the evidence or the fairness of the process – becomes almost irresistible. Throw in a national backlog ballooning to 200,000 cases, and what you get is a system where ordinary Albanians wait over a decade for resolution while politicians like Veliaj get caught in the gears.

None of this is abstract. A popularly elected mayor has been removed from office for the better part of a year without a trial. His family sees him under strict prison visiting rules. Hundreds of thousands of Tirana voters have effectively been deprived of the person they chose to run their city. The human cost is real, and it is felt far beyond the prison walls.

Albania is at a crossroads. The country has done more in the last decade to clean up its judiciary than most outsiders thought possible. Yet cases like this one show how fragile those gains remain – and how easily anti-corruption rhetoric can be used to settle political scores. For the European Union, the dilemma is equally stark: how loudly do you criticize rule-of-law shortcomings in a candidate country whose geopolitical alignment you desperately need? With even U.S. lawmakers now calling for a hard look at the reforms’ failures, the pressure is mounting on Tirana to deliver real fixes, and on Brussels to make those fixes non-negotiable.

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