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Justice through law, or politics through justice?

2026-01-11 18:18:30Pikëpamje SHKRUAR NGA PLARENT NDRECA

 

Justice through law, or politics through justice?
Plarent Ndreca

 

Let's start with what seems self-evident and for that very reason also dangerous: the fight against corruption. Who could be against it? The question itself sounds absurd, even immoral. But this is precisely where the problem begins. When an idea becomes an absolute moral axiom, it ceases to be public policy and turns into ideology. Ideology does not lie openly, it tells half-truths, so convincing that any question about the other half becomes unnecessary.

In Albania today, the fight against corruption has acquired the status of a cause that closes the debate before it even begins. Anyone who demands procedure, standards of proof, or limits on competence is not treated as an institutional critic, but as a moral enemy. This is precisely what should worry us. Democracies are rarely brought down by corruption itself; governments are. They are brought down by the wrong antidote to it, by a medicine so strong that in an attempt to cure the disease, it destroys the organism. So the real question is not whether corruption exists or whether it should be fought. These are answers already given. The real question is more unpleasant and not at all popular: are we doing justice through the law, or are we doing politics through justice, under the ironic pretense that we are not doing politics?

In a state of law, justice is first and foremost a procedure, a due process of law, and only through it does it acquire content. Procedure is not a technical obstacle; it is the very substance of justice. Without due process of law, justice is not misapplied; it simply does not exist. Here the first paradox appears: the more “just” the cause is perceived, the more the procedure is seen as an unnecessary luxury, as an annoying formality, as an obstacle to the “greater good.” It is at this moment that ideological perversity appears: the violation of the law begins to be justified in the name of the law.

A prosecutor or judge who thinks, even silently, that “a sentence is definitely needed because society needs a signal,” is not simply making a professional mistake. He is changing the nature of the role of justice. Signals are the language of political power, not of the law. Justice does not signal; it judges on the basis of the rules established by political power (the law).

At this point, a counterargument is often heard: “Albanian justice is not commanded by politics.” Perhaps. But this is precisely the most sophisticated form of politicization. Justice becomes political not only when it receives party or government orders, but when it adopts a political goal and exercises it without a mandate, in the name of technical neutrality. Decisions are no longer made because legal criteria are met, but because “the case demands it.” And “case” is no longer a legal category. It is a political category. A figure, a moment, a message. The moment justice begins to operate on a symbolic level, it has left the field of law and entered the field of politics.

This produces a dilemma that is rarely articulated openly: are we facing individual cases of corruption, or a deeper transformation of the role of justice in the political order? If justice begins to produce irreversible political consequences before there are final decisions, then it is not limiting power; it is replacing it. This is the classic form of what might be called a judicial state: power without a democratic mandate, exercised in the name of moral legitimacy.

In a democratic order, political vacuums never remain empty. When politics gives up exercising its mandate, making difficult decisions, holding itself accountable, and facing electoral costs, this vacuum is filled by institutions that were not built to act politically. The final and perhaps most cynical paradox is this: this justice is more efficient. It produces arrests, headlines, and the feeling of moral cleansing, which politics failed to do. But this is precisely where the ideological deception lies. Short-term efficiency hides the long-term cost: the destruction of trust in the law as an insurmountable limit. And the moment the citizen understands that the rules are valid only until they become “obstructive,” then they are postponed, he no longer trusts either justice or the state.

The corruption we claim to be fighting does not disappear. It returns in another form, as a power that acts “for our good,” without asking us and without obeying the rules we ourselves have set to limit it. So the ultimate question is not moral, but deeply political: if, to protect the law and in the name of the law, we break the law, what are we really protecting?

The greatest danger is not criminal corruption, but institutional corruption, the illusory idea that criminal corruption can be eliminated by sacrificing precisely what makes society just: the law as a non-negotiable limit to power.


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