Global Integrity Report: Albania - 2010

This peer-reviewed country report includes:

Integrity Indicators Scorecard: Scores, scoring criteria, commentary, references, and peer review perspectives for more than 300 Integrity Indicators.

Reporter's Notebook: An on-the-ground look at corruption and integrity from a leading local journalist.

Corruption Timeline: Ten years of political context to today's corruption and integrity issues.

HIGHLIghts

Global Integrity’s 2010 assessment for Albania serves up counterintuitive findings, calling into question the conventional wisdom that the country is a hotbed of corruption. To be sure, Albania suffers from serious deficiencies in several facets of good governance, such as the poor accountability of its law enforcement agencies -- appointments are not always based on merit, and there is no mechanism to effectively follow up on citizen complaints against the police. Moreover, enforcing conflicts of interest safeguards in the civil service remain weak, while regulations governing the financing of political parties and candidates are notoriously ineffective (in part because of the many loopholes present in a country that “remains a cash-based economy that is largely informal”). Nevertheless, there are signs of improving or relatively strong performances in discrete areas of the country’s good governance architecture. Albania has, for instance, a fairly robust system in place to support the transparency and fairness of public procurement. In addition, anti-corruption NGOs remain vibrant, and the enforcement of tax and customs laws has improved over the years. The overall legal framework of Albania’s anti-corruption and good governance system is quite strong, but efforts to close the large implementation gap need to be stepped up considerably for additional progress to occur.

From our Reporter's Notebook:

To be transferred from other districts and to be appointed to Tirana or Durrës, a judge should pay between 5 and 7 million lek (US$50,000 and US$70,000); a place in the Court of Appeals costs a judge up to 25 million lek (US$250,000); while for a place on the Supreme Court, the shame ‘tender’ starts at least 40 million lek (US$400,000)… Once appointed, judges who paid large sums for their positions presumably go on to accept bribes to "make back their investment.”