BIRN Wins Appeal to Declassify Albanian Secret Police Files

The landmark ruling by the Administrative Court of Appeals in Tirana on Wednesday paved the way for the declassification and publication of written reports and statistical data produced by Albania's Sigurimi security service.

After almost three years of legal efforts by BIRN Albania, the court dismissed arguments from the country's current secret service that such information should be kept secret in perpetuity.

The ruling, which cannot be appealed, upheld a first-instance court decision from 2016.

BIRN first made a legal request for the declassification of Communist-era files back in March 2016, demanding yearly reports by the Sigurimi for the period from 1980 to 1989, as well as statistical information on the number of Albanians under active surveillance by the Sigurimi during that period.

The current State Information Service, SHISH, which has controlled a large part of the Sigurimi archive since the fall of Communism, first refused the request, claiming it didn't have the authority to handle it.

Albania's Freedom of Information Commissioner ordered SHISH to open the files and to reevaluate their status as secret, based on a 2014 law on freedom of information.

However, SHISH then insisted in September 2016 that the information sought by BIRN should remain a state secret.

BIRN challenged the decision in an administrative court, and won in the first instance in November 2016.

However, the Administrative Court of Appeals has a backlog of some 20,000 cases and the appeal decision only came almost three years after BIRN's first freedom of information request.

During the hearing, SHISH emphasised that in its opinion, the files and statistics should remain "secrets in perpetuity", and said that it has "an exclusive...