When constitutional rights require permission

Albania’s main television stations have asked the High Judicial Council to let them broadcast live trials involving senior politicians and other cases of major public interest.

What is more troubling than the likely rejection of their request is the fact that they had to make it at all. In 2026, Albania’s biggest broadcasters are asking the justice bureaucracy for permission to exercise a constitutional right they are supposed to already have.

That alone says enough.

When Albanian media is reduced to asking a justice bureaucracy for a constitutional right, press freedom has already been violated — along with citizens’ basic constitutional rights.

The fact that broadcasters had to address the High Judicial Council at all shows the frustration created by SPAK and GJKKO. These institutions have shown open disregard for basic rights: freedom of expression and the public’s right to follow trials that clearly concern the public interest, especially trials of senior politicians.

Trying politicians in the dark only strengthens claims that these are political trials. It also prevents the public from judging the quality of the justice being delivered and the quality of the accusations being made.

No citizen and no media outlet should have to ask permission to exercise a right guaranteed by the Constitution.

The Constitution is clear. Media freedom is guaranteed. The right to information is not a favour from the state. It is a basic right the state must protect.

Parliament broadcasts its proceedings live. The Constitutional Court broadcasts its hearings live. Municipal councils broadcast their meetings. The High Judicial Council and the High Prosecutorial Council broadcast their own activities.

They do this for one simple reason: public power does not belong to institutions. It belongs to citizens. Institutions only exercise it temporarily. Citizens therefore have the right to see how power is used in their name.

The Constitutional Court, Albania’s highest court, has already shown how this can work. In the Erion Veliaj case, it produced the signal itself and made the hearing available to the public.

That was not a favour to the media. It was not a privilege for the public. It was a basic guarantee of justice.

Justice must not only be done. People must also see how a judge is persuaded to deliver justice, or punishment, against someone. That is what builds public trust in justice — or destroys it.

This is especially important when senior officials and politicians are on trial.

The High Judicial Council, the institution that should guarantee transparency, approved a mechanism in 2023 that in practice produces censorship and reverses the constitutional standard.

Under that rule, transparency has become the exception. Restriction has become the rule.

The media must submit requests, wait for authorisation and receive refusals. In other words, it must negotiate a right the Constitution already recognises.

In a free democratic country seeking to join the European Union, constitutional rights should not require permission. They should be exercised.

No one should ask permission to be informed. No one should ask permission to follow, through the media, a hearing that the law itself declares public.

It should simply be followed.

It should simply be broadcast.

The Constitution is also clear on limits. Fundamental freedoms can be restricted only by law, only for a legitimate purpose, and only when the restriction is necessary and proportionate.

But the restrictions being applied today do not come from law. They come from an administrative instruction.

That is not just an administrative problem. It is a constitutional one.

An administrative body cannot create new limits on rights that the law itself has not limited. Still less can it interfere with a constitutional guarantee of a fair trial.

Open justice is not an administrative detail. It is part of due process.

Today, an administrative employee or a police officer at the courthouse door, holding an internal instruction, can block a right guaranteed by the Constitution.

A tool created by law to give the public oversight of justice is being restricted by the very institution that should guarantee transparency.

Open justice is being reduced to the physical size of a courtroom. That is a technical problem, and an easy one to solve: either by producing a television signal for all media, or by using larger dedicated halls for trials of major public interest.

When the media is stopped in advance from doing its job, that is prior restraint in the name of the new justice system.

The public’s right to follow a trial of public interest cannot be limited by bureaucratic excuses about small courtrooms or the discomfort of judges and prosecutors.

At best, these trials are a chance for judges and prosecutors to become public figures in the best sense: people seen delivering justice.

But they seem to think the opposite. Once they enter the courtroom and realise the public may judge them too, they prefer darkness.

That is why they have chosen justice in the dark: closed-door trials, hearings where defendants still do not have the case files, and proceedings where the public hears only the prosecution’s claim and the judge’s decision — not how the arguments are tested, challenged and proved.

That undermines the authority of justice.

It deliberately weakens public trust in the new justice system and it reveals the fear prosecutors and judges have of their own professional weakness — the fear that they cannot persuade the public they are making fair decisions.

In the end, it shows that their only real strength is the lack of transparency: justice done in the dark, far from the eyes of the people, but in the name of the people.

Originally published in Albanian as: Të kërkosh leje për të drejtat e tua kushtetuese