THE ALBANIAN PUBLIC'S TRUST IN SECURITY: STUMBLING BLOCKS TO EU NEGOTIATIONS to organized crime but are too often the greatest victims of corruption and infiltration from these very same organizations. 4.1. Judicial Officials. The corruption of judicial officials and their relations with the criminal underworld is greatly evident in Albania. The judicial system has been evaluated as being so corrupt and dysfunctional that a very deep and all-encompassing justice reform has been taking place since 2016. It aims to totally remake the justice system from the top down to remove corrupt judges and prosecutors. These changes have deeply affected the performance of the judicial system, especially at the highest levels. As part of the justice reform procedures, a very inquisitive vetting process has taken place. This requires judges and court officials, and their direct family members, to go through an evaluation process which demands them to justify the monetary means in which they acquired their possessions(real estate, automobiles, even jewelry, and electronics), in addition to evaluating their academic credentials in case of academic fraud or fake diplomas being used to qualify for court positions. The results from this process were not shocking to most of the Albanian public. The majority of the judges and prosecutors that went through the vetting grind did not pass. 56 The vetting process found that nearly all of the members of the Constitutional and High Court did not pass the vetting process. This resulted in them being sacked from their positions and being barred from all career paths and jobs in justice, except for academic positions. This process rendered both of these important institutions functionally incapable to operate as neither of these courts possessed the minimal number of judges to have the sufficient quorum to be able to take decisions. Until recently both these institutions were left completely dysfunctional due to the lack of judges and have only started to be re-staffed with newly appointed judges in the past few months. The Constitutional Court has, at the present moment only four judges, and the Supreme Court has only three. An analysis of the underlying causes of the need for justice reform is mostly related to the level of corruption and politicization of these institutions. However, an in-depth study of the justice system as it pertains to corruption and the lack of public trust in it has taken several studies and publications in itself. If we would focus more acutely on public perception of the justice institutions, we could get a simpler-to-understand picture of why courts and prosecutors are not perceived as being legitimate institutions in the fight against crime and the maintaining of the public order. In the ASB, when asked about their trust in justice institutions, more than half of the people claimed that they did not trust the justice institutions(both courts and prosecutors) at all. 56 Raport Studimor: Monitorim i Procesit të Vetingut Janar 2017-Qershor 2018. Albanian Helsinki Committee. http://www.osfa.al/sites/default/files/raport-studimor-monitorimi-i-procesit-te-vettingut-te-gjyqtareve-dhe­prokuroreve_jan17-qer18.pdf 71