Opinion
Initials are not a verdict
The prime minister read a list of detainees on camera while the courts are ruling with restraint. When young people and minors are involved, justice must speak first, not politics.
By ANN Newsroom · Newsroom
October 23, 2026, 18:45 · Updated 18:39 · 2 min read
On Friday Prime Minister Edi Rama read out to the media a list of about 45 people detained during the protests, with initials, ages and criminal records, saying they are not students. He claimed four of them are suspected of having been funded by Iran, a claim that has not been independently verified. The list included a 17-year-old. And a 20-year-old, J.S., a medical student, took off his mask in front of the cameras to say he has no criminal record and that police had held him for seven and a half hours.
On the same day, the courts showed a different way of working. Since the protests began, 194 people arrested have appeared before the Tirana Criminal Court; 170 were released with an obligation to report to police. On Friday the court rejected the prosecution's request to bar eight protesters from approaching institutions and protest areas. A 14-year-old and another minor, A.B., were handled by the juvenile judge, with parents and psychologists present.
Violence must be punished, and anyone who threw objects at police must answer for it. But responsibility is assigned by a court, not by a press conference. When the prime minister places the name of a student with no record next to charges of drug dealing and murder, the mistake is not small: it damages his reputation and undermines the credibility of the list itself.
The opposition bears responsibility too. Berisha cited a 13- or 14-year-old at the toppling of Hoxha's bust in 1991 to defend minors' right to protest. Meanwhile Deputy Interior Minister Silva Caka warned that young people and children at protests risk being drawn into situations instigated by others. Children should be neither evidence of how dangerous the protest is nor its symbol.
Our proposal: the government should stop publishing lists of detainees before prosecutors have filed charges, and publicly correct the case of the student J.S. The Tirana prosecutor's office should publish weekly aggregate statistics on arrests, measures and ages. And the protocol used for A.B., with parents and psychologists, should become a mandatory rule for every minor taken in from the protests, from the first moment at the police station.
