The rule about constitutional review is that a court examines a measure while the measure is doing something, and the ruling changes the position of somebody who is currently affected by it. That is what the remedy is for.
The exception is a measure with an expiry date, and Albania has just produced an unusually clean example of one.
On 11 March the country’s Constitutional Court held that the government’s one year ban on TikTok had been a violation of freedom of expression and freedom of the press. The ban had already been repealed by the government on 3 February, five weeks earlier. The court struck down something that had stopped existing.
The date
The sequence starts in November 2024, with a fourteen year old boy stabbed to death by a fellow pupil after an argument that had run on social media.
In December the prime minister announced that TikTok would be shut down in Albania for a year, as part of a wider set of school safety measures. The language was not hedged. There would be no TikTok in Albania. The block took effect in March 2025.
It is worth being fair to the decision as it looked at the time. A child had been killed, a platform was plausibly implicated in the escalation, the measure was time limited rather than permanent, and it had public support. Governments have done a great deal worse in response to considerably less.
What it turned out to mean
The ban ran. Then, on 3 February this year, the government adopted a decision repealing it, and access was restored. There was no climbdown and no reversal, because the year was up.
Five weeks after that the court ruled. It found that cutting off access to the platform restricted freedom of expression and freedom of the press. It also found, and this part deserves attention because it is the more interesting half, that the ban did not violate the freedom of economic activity.
Those two findings together describe the shape of the harm precisely. The court is saying the injury was to speech, suffered by the people who use the service to say things and to find out what is happening, rather than to a company deprived of a market. That is a more careful piece of reasoning than the headline suggests, and it locates the constitutional interest in the right place: with the users, not with the platform.
The problem the sequence exposes
Now the structural point, which is not specific to Albania and is not really about TikTok.
A government that wishes to do something a constitutional court would not permit has a straightforward option available: do it for a fixed period shorter than the time the court takes.
Constitutional review is slow by design. A case is filed, briefed, heard and decided, and in most systems that is a matter of many months even when everybody involved treats it as urgent. A measure lasting twelve months is very likely to expire before judgment, and once it has expired the remedy has nothing to attach to. There is no access to restore, because access was restored. There is nobody to compensate, because the judgment does not award compensation. The finding is declaratory.
This is not a loophole anyone invented. It falls out of two reasonable features, a court that takes time to decide properly and a government that limits its own emergency measures, and the combination produces an arrangement in which the time limit that makes a measure more proportionate also makes it effectively unreviewable.
The wider pattern
Albania is a small country and this was a short ban, which is exactly why it is a useful case: the mechanism is visible without being buried under geopolitics.
The same platform has been restricted in a number of places for a number of stated reasons, and the reasons do not resemble each other. India blocked it along with dozens of other Chinese applications in 2020, on national security grounds, and that block has simply persisted. The American legislation was built around divestment rather than prohibition, and its constitutional challenge was resolved on the specific ground of foreign adversary control rather than on anything about speech. Various governments restrict it on official devices, which is a procurement decision and raises no rights question at all.
Albania’s was none of those. It was a child protection measure, aimed at domestic harm, applied to the whole population, for a fixed term. That is the version most likely to be attempted elsewhere, because it is the one with a sympathetic cause and a built in end date, and it is the version this judgment addresses.
What proportionality would have required
The finding that the ban restricted expression does not mean no restriction is ever permissible. It means a restriction has to be justified, and the standard is roughly the same across European systems: prescribed by law, pursuing a legitimate aim, necessary in a democratic society, and no more extensive than the aim requires.
The first two are straightforward here. A government protecting children from violence is pursuing a legitimate aim and nobody argues otherwise.
The difficulty is the fourth. A total block on a platform for an entire population is the most extensive measure available, and the question a court asks is whether something less would have served. Age verification, restrictions on under sixteens, obligations on the platform to change what it recommends to minors, action in schools: each of those is narrower, each was available, and a government choosing the broadest instrument has to explain why the narrower ones would not do.
That is the argument the Albanian government did not have to make in 2024, because nobody could compel it to make one in time. It will have to make it next time.
What a declaratory judgment is worth
Less than an injunction and more than nothing, and the difference matters for what happens next.
What it cannot do is undo the year. Nobody in Albania gets that back, and the court has not attempted to pretend otherwise.
What it does is fix a precedent before the next occasion rather than during it. The next time a government in that country proposes to block a platform, the legal question is no longer open: shutting off access is a restriction on expression and on the press, and it has to be justified as such, against a standard the court has now articulated. A minister drafting the measure knows this in advance. So does the official who has to sign it.
That is worth having, and it arrives on a delay of about fifteen months from the announcement. Whether that is a functioning system depends entirely on how often you think the question will come up, and on current evidence it will come up often.
The five weeks
The detail I keep returning to is the gap between the two dates.
On 3 February a government decision restored access, and people in Albania opened the app again, and by the following week the restoration was no longer a story anywhere.
On 11 March a court sat and delivered a judgment about a restriction that, by then, nobody was experiencing. The people whose rights had been found to be violated had already stopped being affected, a month earlier, by an administrative decision that had nothing to do with the case and did not mention it.
