What Business Does the Republican Guard Have Guarding a Courthouse?!

By Ylli Manjani

There is a question that in a normal state should have been answered on day one: what business does the Republican Guard have at the entrance of a courthouse?

Because this is not an aesthetic issue. Nor is it a matter of protocol. It is a constitutional issue.

Inexplicably, ever since the inspections of the so-called “Xhafaj Commission” at the GJKKO building, the Republican Guard appeared on its outer perimeter. Little by little, the Guard no longer stayed outside. Today it also controls the courthouse entrance, screens citizens and lawyers, and imposes restrictions on entering the courtroom.

Under what law?

Who decided that a military unit should replace civilian security or even the State Police in keeping order at a courthouse?

The Republican Guard is not the police. The Guard is an armed formation, with an entirely different status, training and powers. It was created to protect the highest personalities of the state and the institutions where they exercise their functions. It also performs ceremonial duties, but above all it remains a force that the law equips with far broader powers for the use of weapons than the State Police.

In short: the Guard has soldiers. The Police has police officers. The difference is not terminological. It is a philosophy of the state.

Then the questions become even more serious.

What extraordinary risk exists at the GJKKO that the State Police cannot handle?

Who threatened public order so gravely that the government was forced to place the Guard at a courthouse’s disposal?

And if there is no such risk, why was the entrance of an institution that, according to the Constitution, holds public trials militarized?

We’re no longer talking about security here. We’re talking about powers.

How can a soldier be mandated to screen a lawyer or even a prosecutor and forbid them from carrying their cell phone, their work tool?

Since when are the administrative rules of the courtroom enforced by the Republican Guard? What does the courthouse need when the rules are made by the soldier at its door?!

Since when does an armed unit decide who enters and who doesn’t enter a public hearing?

The rules of the courtroom are set by the judge, within the powers given to him by procedural law. They are not set by the administration as it pleases. Even less by a military force.

And this is precisely where the big problem begins.

A courthouse is not a barracks. It is not a military unit. It is not a secret military facility. It is the place where the citizen confronts the state and where the public has the right to follow justice in its name.

When the entrance is controlled by the Guard, when the public is obstructed, when even the parties to proceedings face restrictions that don’t clearly stem from the law, then the unavoidable question arises:

Can this courthouse still be called public?

In fact, this story is a symptom of a bigger disease: the state is being governed according to the mood of the day.

When the mood is good, institutions do whatever they want. When the mood sours, they start showing each other their “powers.”

The same logic was used with salaries. Laws were made in a good mood. Then, when conflict came, each bared the teeth of its own competence. Each talks about its own “purse”…

This is not the rule of law. It is the emotional administration of power.

And the ending is always the same.

The state loses.

The law loses.

The public loses.

Because when the state starts militarizing spaces of justice without a clear legal explanation, its authority is not strengthened. On the contrary, its legitimacy is weakened.

And when legitimacy is replaced by force, thuggery takes heart. It insults, offends, threatens, blocks, because it feels free and that there’s no one to stop it. Well — the state has troubles with itself…

This shows no culture of state.

It shows a state that, instead of the law, is being led by the mood of the day.