The Face of Albania's “New Justice”: How One Judge Became Its Ruin

Alfred Lela

Some people carry a predisposition toward evil in their features; in their eyes, you can constantly glimpse the leering wink of malice and concealed intent.

That is the impression one gets from a portrait assembled from the photographs circulating in the media: the haste of someone who believes that only by fleeing can they hide; a wild mane of hair like that of the Erinyes who pursued matricides; the facial expression of someone who knows she holds something in her hand—and knows equally well that the hand is not truly hers.

With the retributive appearance of a troll out of Scandinavian legend, Irena Gjoka has been the judiciary’s “ready-at-hand” judge in every criminal case brought against figures of the opposition—starting with the highest-profile among them, Sali Berisha.

This lottery-like “coincidence” of assignments, more than anything else, cast suspicion not only on her, but also on the one spinning the wheel.

The opposition’s narrative—that the woman in question was in a conflict of interest, that she had passed vetting through violations and with “intervention from above”—was dismissed by the government’s trumpeters as an “attack on the new justice.” Articles from Greek newspapers were portrayed as incursions by the Greek right into sacred Illyrian territory, as Athens’ political elite’s jealousy of the regional and global star Edi Rama, along with other delusions of those who, possessing the present, believe they can also purchase the past—their own and that of their servants.

Irena Gjoka was not seen, classified, or debated as a judge of the Republic, but as an adversary and anathema to Sali Berisha: the woman destined to bring down, with thunderous force, the historic leader of the Albanian right, while reinstating a leftist narrative that sought to explain every Albanian failure through the name of the man who had ended a system that itself had reached the terminal point of failure.

Irena became the anti-Berisha totem—the symbol of a “new justice” that was finally working; of a “new Albania” where, at last, impunity was sinking to make room for the era of “blessed be whoever lives to see it, madam!”

The documented resistance of the opposition, international reports and resolutions, and the open violations committed by segments of the so-called new justice were relativized by the Prime Minister and amplified by the regime’s buglers, until—through relentless repetition—they were either emptied of meaning or reduced to complaints told too late to matter.

This chronology of events and this context help us understand why the findings of the General Prosecutor’s Office—that Irena Gjoka concealed a criminal conviction in Greece on her declaration form—constitute more than a personal disgrace. Just as exposed and stigmatized by this conclusion should be the entire network of government propagandists.

This is a collective humiliation, a shared vice, a public immorality—an epic shkërdhatocracy of “intellectuals of both the stick and the rope,” who for years have exerted pressure not from moral height, but from position; not from superiority, but from calculation.

They may now take the totem of the judge with three surnames and use it to plug every hole in their web of lies.

The face of the “new justice” today is nothing more than the caricature of a troll from Scandinavian mythology—one that Nordic parents once used, for centuries, to frighten children.