Rama’s “Full Guarantee” and His Political Responsibility for Vlora Hyseni

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 the presumption of innocence, refused to comment on the merits of the investigation, and announced Hyseni’s immediate removal from office. Rama also criticized the way such cases, in his view, are turned into public trials by the media before any court verdict.

“It seems inevitable that every investigation or measure taken by justice against public figures turns into an excuse to grind human flesh in the political and media mincer and to call for the ‘rope’ as in medieval execution squares, long before the court has spoken,” he wrote on the social network X.

But beyond Hyseni’s criminal liability, which remains to be determined by justice, Rama’s reaction left another question unaddressed: his 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 dismissing opposition questions about her professional past as “the gossip of our political and media village.”

SHISH director Vlora Hyseni was suspended from duty by a decision of the Special Court against Corruption and Organized Crime and placed under “house arrest” on Tuesday, triggering one of the most serious national security crises of recent decades.

Hyseni is charged by the Special Prosecution with 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 the Special Prosecution is conducting into Ergys Agasi, a former Ministry of Environment official accused of creating a structured criminal group to manipulate tenders of the National Agency for the Information Society, AKSHI.

Article 92, point f, of the Constitution clearly states 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,” said lawyer and civil society activist Gentian Serjani.

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

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

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

Illustrating the case through a sports analogy, Serjani said it is just like “a player playing badly, even selling the match, and the coach refusing to substitute him and justifying himself by claiming that responsibility for the defeat lies only with the player.”

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

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

But, according to Mërtiri, the problem does not lie only in the wrong choice.

“The case also speaks of the state of the institutions that guarantee security in the country, for which the Prime Minister is definitely the main person responsible,” he said.

“If the head of this institution turns out to be in such a close and visible connection with exponents of organized crime and no one in this state knows or reports anything, it shows that 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 bears no responsibility for those who commit criminal acts behind his back — already a refrain for dozens of cases of senior officials investigated for criminal offenses — is “utterly banal.”

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

“In this concrete case, Edi Rama is definitely politically responsible for having threatened the country’s national security by placing at the head of the intelligence service a person so irresponsible as to put SHISH at the service of the head of a criminal group,” Mërtiri emphasized.

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

According to him, the Hyseni case goes beyond individual criminal liability, since for the first time the serving head of the State Intelligence Service is placed under house arrest and suspended/dismissed from duty, suspected 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 a political obligation to explain not what Hyseni did or did not do criminally, but how political control and oversight of the most sensitive institution of national security functioned.”

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

“When the signals existed, who verified them and what measures were taken?” he asked, 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 response to the signals, and the guarantees that such a situation has not compromised national security,” he concluded.