BIRN: Rama’s “full guarantee” and his political accountability for Vlora Hyseni

Three years ago, Prime Minister Edi Rama dismissed the questions raised by the opposition about the appointment of Vlora Hyseni as head of SHISH. After she was placed under house arrest at SPAK’s request, he insists that the responsibility is individual.

From New York, where he was attending the UN General Assembly, Prime Minister Edi Rama reacted to the house arrest measure against SHISH director Vlora Hyseni, emphasizing that her case is individual and must be left to justice.

He reiterated the principle of presumption of innocence, refused to comment on the merits of the investigation, and announced Hyseni’s immediate release from duty.

Rama also criticized what he described as the way such cases turn into public trials by the media before there is a court ruling.

“It seems inevitable that every investigation or measure taken by the justice system against public figures becomes a pretext for tearing human flesh apart in the political and media square and for calling for the ‘noose’ as in medieval execution grounds, long before the court has its say,” he wrote on the social media platform ‘X’.

But beyond Hyseni’s criminal responsibility, which remains to be determined by the justice system, Rama’s reaction left another issue unaddressed: his own political responsibility for selecting and proposing her.

In 2023, the prime minister presented Hyseni’s experience and reputation as a “full guarantee” for leading SHISH, while labeling the questions raised by the opposition about her professional past as “the gossip of our political and media village.”

The director of the State Intelligence Service, Vlora Hyseni, was suspended from duty by order of the Special Court against Corruption and Organized Crime and placed under “house arrest” on Tuesday, triggering one of the gravest crises in the national security sector in recent decades.

Hyseni is accused by the Special Prosecution Office of the criminal offenses of supporting the perpetrator of a crime and disclosing state or service secrets.

The security measures against the SHISH director stem from the investigation that the Special Prosecution Office is conducting into Ergys Agasi, a former official at the Ministry of Environment, accused of forming a structured criminal group to manipulate tenders of the National Agency for Information Society, AKSHI.

Article 92, point f, of the Constitution clearly stipulates that the proposal for appointing the SHISH Director is made by the Prime Minister, while the appointment is formalized by decree of the President of the Republic.

“In this sense, the political responsibility for selecting and proposing Hyseni undoubtedly belongs to the Prime Minister,” says lawyer and civil society activist Gentian Serjani.

According to him, before the proposal Rama should have carried out the necessary verifications even regarding the earlier circumstances of Hyseni’s career in Kosovo and assessed whether there were elements requiring additional clarification.

Serjani argues that Rama’s claim that Hyseni’s criminal responsibility is personal does not close the debate on the political responsibility for the choice.

“A official’s personal responsibility for his or her actions does not exclude the political responsibility of the authority that selected and proposed that official for a high state office,” he said.

Illustrating the case through a sporting analogy, Serjani said it is as if “a player plays badly, even sells the match, and the coach refuses to take him out of the game and justifies himself with the reasoning that only the player bears the responsibility for the loss.”

Sociologist and political analyst Ergys Mërtiri links Rama’s responsibility not only to the choice of Hyseni, but also to the way control and verification mechanisms work for heads of security institutions.

“The head of the secret services is not just any position, as it is linked to national security and here people with a high level of reliability must be chosen,” he said.

But, according to Mërtiri, the problem is not just the wrong choice.

“The case also tells us about the state of the institutions that guarantee security in the country, for which the Prime Minister is certainly the chief responsible,” he said.

“If the head of this institution turns out to be in such a close and obvious connection with exponents of organized crime and no one in this state knows anything or reports anything, that shows the state as a whole is in a catastrophic condition,” Mërtiri added.

According to Mërtiri, the stance that responsibilities are individual and that the Prime Minister has no responsibility for those who commit criminal acts behind his back, now turned into a refrain for dozens upon dozens of cases of senior officials under investigation for criminal acts, is “utterly banal.”

“He is totally politically responsible for the fact that he chooses so many corrupt people and that he has seen nothing of their wrongdoings, even though they were so visible and flagrant,” he said.

“In this specific case, Edi Rama is certainly politically responsible for endangering the country’s national security by putting at the head of the intelligence service a person so irresponsible that she places SHISH at the service of the head of a criminal group,” Mërtiri emphasized.

Journalist and political analyst Lutfi Dervishi formulates Rama’s political responsibility through three questions: what did the prime minister know, what should he have known, and what did he do when the signals appeared.

According to him, the Hyseni case goes beyond individual criminal responsibility, because for the first time the sitting head of the State Intelligence Service is placed under house arrest and suspended/dismissed from duty, on suspicion of disclosing state secrets and supporting the perpetrator of a crime.

“The head of SHISH does not fall from the sky,” Dervishi said. “The prime minister has the political obligation to explain not what Hyseni did or did not do criminally, but how the political control and oversight of the most sensitive institution of national security has functioned.”

For Dervishi, the way Hyseni came to head SHISH raises questions, because she was not elevated through a career within the Albanian service, but came from the Kosovo Intelligence Agency, where she had served as deputy director and acting head.

“When the signals existed, who verified them and what measures were taken?” – he asks, noting that SHISH had also functioned without a deputy director – an important link in the institution’s hierarchy.

“Political responsibility begins precisely with the obligation to explain the choice, the oversight, the reaction to signals, and the guarantees that such a situation has not jeopardized national security,” Dervishi concluded./BIRN