Can a Government Unprotect a Protected Area Without Ever Removing Its Protected Status?
Written by Lea Nierlich and Tatum Kennedy
Vjosa is not just an environmental fight. It's a test of the rule of law.
The Vjosa-Narta Protected Landscape is still, on every official map and in every international database, a protected area. Its lagoons and salt pans sit largely undisturbed on Albania's Adriatic coast, one of the last stretches of its kind in the Balkans, where flocks of flamingos and Dalmatian pelicans gather among hundreds of other migratory bird species. Albania first designated it as such by a decision of the Council of Ministers in October 2004, in recognition of exactly that. That decision was never reversed. Its designation has never been revoked. Nobody voted to strip it of that status. And yet permits have been approved for a large hotel, residential, and marina complex inside it, and on the Zvërnec peninsula roads have been opened, a bridge built, the area fenced off, and some 2.8 hectares of dune and pine forest cleared. An international airport is also already under construction on the edge of the same protected coastline.
Both things are true at once, and that is precisely the point. Albania did not need to touch the park's protected status to gut what that status actually protects. It only needed to rewrite what the law allows inside the lines, while leaving the lines themselves untouched.
One rewritten article
On February 22, 2024, Albania's parliament passed Law 21/2024, formally just "some additions and amendments" to the existing 2017 Law on Protected Areas. Article 14 of the new law rewrites Article 33 of the old one, the specific clause that lists what activities are permitted inside a protected area. Where the old Article 33 restricted development, the new one permits five-star and higher accommodation, plus supporting infrastructure, inside protected zones, including areas classified under the strictest international categories, IUCN Category I and II, ordinarily reserved for places where almost no development is meant to occur at all. It also hands authority over building rules inside these reserves to a separate body, the National Territorial Council, and allows the boundaries of protected areas to be redrawn to accommodate specific projects.
None of this appears as a repeal. Nowhere does the law say "the Vjosa-Narta Protected Landscape is hereby unprotected." It says, in effect, that what counts as compatible with protection has changed. The park keeps its name, its lines on the map, its listing in every conservation database. What it no longer reliably keeps is any actual restriction on what can be built inside it.
A Council of Ministers decision from September 2024, No. 596, shows what that means in practice. It removed the area's internal zoning: the share under the highest level of protection fell from 42.82 percent to zero, while the share under the third level rose from 2.73 percent to 100 percent, opening the area to tourism accommodation, roads, and energy installations.
Why the label survives when the substance doesn't
This matters legally in a way that is easy to miss. Formally revoking a protected area's status is politically costly and internationally visible: it would draw immediate attention from the IUCN, from UNESCO if relevant, from the European Commission mid-accession, from the conservation groups that track exactly this kind of move. Quietly rewriting what is permitted inside a status that remains nominally intact draws far less of that attention, and gives the government a genuinely useful thing to say when it does: that the park is still protected, that nothing has been taken away.
The Albanian government has, in fact, said something close to that. It described the 2024 changes as aligned with IUCN criteria. The IUCN disagreed. At its 2025 World Conservation Congress, more than 98 percent of its member organizations voted for a motion calling on Albania to amend the law, stating plainly that it contradicts the international standards the government claimed to be following. That gap, between what a government says a law does and what the law's own text actually permits, is not a technicality. It is close to the whole question this case raises: whether "protected," as a legal term, still means anything if a government can hollow it out from the inside while continuing to use the word.
Why the courts couldn't stop it
Albania's Constitutional Court had a chance to answer that question directly. Environmental groups and a fifth of parliament petitioned to have Law 21/2024 struck down. The case ended in a 4 to 4 tie, and a tie is not a majority, so the law stood. The court's reasoning leaned on the same ambiguity the law itself was built on: it treated Law 21/2024 as a "framework" law, one step removed from any concrete harm, since the law itself does not bulldoze anything. It only permits later decrees and project approvals to do that. The actual damage, the court effectively said, has not happened yet, so there is nothing yet to rule on.
That is a genuinely difficult position for a court to get past, and it is difficult by design. A law that revokes protection outright gives a court something concrete to strike down. A law that only redefines what protection permits gives a court a moving target: the harm is always one step further down the chain, in a decree not yet issued, a permit not yet granted, a boundary not yet redrawn. By the time any of that happens, the underlying law that made it possible has already survived its first chance at review.
That chain has now reached its next link. In September 2026, EcoAlbania, the Albanian Ornithological Society, Res Publica, and REC Albania turned to the Constitutional Court to challenge that decision. They are asking for its repeal, for its suspension in the meantime, and for the court to look again at Law 21/2024 itself. Their argument is that the 2025 ruling left exactly such decisions open to review, and that the protection was lowered without a new assessment showing the area's natural values had diminished, without a strategic environmental assessment, and without effective public participation.
Why now, and why this is bigger than one law
The timing is not incidental. Albania is mid-negotiation for EU accession, a process that requires formally adopting the EU's environmental acquis, the Birds and Habitats Directives among them, on paper. It does not, in practice, require enforcing them with the same rigor a member state eventually has to. That gap between formal adoption and real enforcement is exactly the space Law 21/2024 operates in: comply with the letter of what accession requires, while quietly rewriting what compliance permits underneath it. The Bern Convention has taken notice: in July 2026, its Bureau demanded detailed information from Albania on the permits issued, the developments planned, and their cumulative impacts, and warned that the same approach could threaten other candidate sites across the country. At home, the protests that began over the resort have grown into a nationwide movement against Law 21/2024.
Prime Minister Edi Rama has, in his own way, said as much publicly. Facing weeks of what became known as the "Flamingo Revolution," street protests against the planned resort that drew thousands of demonstrators to Tirana carrying inflatable pink flamingos, he told reporters the real challenge was not "pouring concrete over the flamingos' heads," but proving that economic development and nature conservation could coexist. It is a telling way to frame the question, because it takes for granted the very point the law's opponents dispute: that development inside a strict nature reserve is a matter of getting the balance right, rather than a category of decision the protection was designed to rule out entirely.
That is why this is a rule of law question and not only an environmental one. If a legal protection can be preserved in name while its substance is rewritten out from under it, and a court can decline to intervene because the harm is technically still one step away, the same technique is not limited to protected areas. It works on any legal status whose value depends on what it substantively guarantees rather than on the label itself. A country can point to the label, in Brussels or at an IUCN congress, and say: nothing has changed here. The park still exists. The designation is intact. Whether that sentence means anything at all is a separate question, one the law was built not to have to answer.
Why this matters beyond one park
This is exactly the kind of gap AllRise's Park Hub initiative was built to close: not just documenting that a protected area is being developed, but tracing the legal mechanism that let a government call it protected while permitting exactly what protection was supposed to prevent. A designation that survives on paper while its substance is legislated away is not a loophole in the usual sense. It is a working demonstration of how a government can keep every formal promise it made and break every real one behind it. That is the gap this case is really testing, and it will not close on its own.
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Disclaimer: This article was developed with the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, which were used to support research, fact-checking, and editorial review. All content has been reviewed and approved by the author(s), who remain responsible for the accuracy, interpretation, and conclusions presented.