Constitutional Reform in Brazil: Lessons from Albania?

Abstract

Corruption is a fact of public life in Brazil. Since the country’s transition to democracy, corruption has been a challenge for each presidential administration. The Brazilian judiciary has not escaped the corrupting influences in the region. One country whose challenges with judicial corruption are arguably even greater than Brazil’s is Albania, a country for which we were appointed to act as Consultants to the Special Parliamentary Committee on the Reform of the Judicial System responsible for introducing major constitutional reforms aimed at curbing judicial corruption. Those reforms to the Albanian Constitution entered into force in 2016. Too little time has elapsed since then to evaluate whether these reforms will fulfill their purposes. And certainly much too little time has passed for us to know whether the reforms in Albania can be applied with any confidence elsewhere in the world where similar problems with judicial corruption continue to undermine democratic norms of transparency and accountability, namely in Brazil. We nonetheless believe it is useful to explain the Albanian constitutional reforms and to introduce them to readers in Brazil as available options for combatting judicial corruption.

Keywords: Constitutional Reform, Constitutional Amendment, Corruption, Albania, Judicial Corruption, Transitional Vetting, European Union, Impeachment, Petrobras, Odebrecht, National Council of Justice, Constitutional Court of Albania, Code of Judicial Ethics, High Judicial Council, School of Magistrates