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Southeast Europe
August 17, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 15
temptation is to revert to the use of corruption and client-sponsor relations that are simpler to operate and have the advantage of personally en- riching their executors in the process. Add to this the client-sponsor system means political power accrues to the individual controlling the system and in the rough and tumble of the post-Socialist world politicians are reluctant to weaken their personal power by strengthening the power of in- stitutions that are in the best interests of society, as they are often engaged in politically existential struggles with other less scrupulous rivals. As a result to a great extent across the entire region corruption is not a problem of the system: it is the system.
The backtracking in Romania started shortly after the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and its jun-
ior coalition partner the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats (Alde) were returned to power in the December 2016 general election. The following month, the new government adopted a controver- sial decree partly decriminalising abuse of office, a charge frequently used by prosecutors against officials who had stolen state resources. Forced to back down and cancel the decree by the biggest mass protests since the fall of communism, the government didn’t give up. Instead it went on to launch repeated effects to chip away at the effec- tiveness of the judicial system and the DNA over the following 18 months.
By mid-2018, the parliament had approved a series of controversial changes to the criminal procedure code. In a return to the original course of attack by the government, the planned amend- ments to the criminal code include a redefinition of abuse of office, which would partly decriminal- ise the offence. Other changes concern the justice system, and have been criticised for limiting the freedom of expression of magistrates and weak- ening the role of the Superior Council of Magis- tracy (SCM), as the guarantor of the judiciary’s independence.
The DNA is the embodiment of the anti-graft ef- forts and represents the transformation of the
system to all that the EU means in terms of a functioning liberal democracy based on account- able institutions. As such it has been the target of the revanchist forces that want to keep the old client system, as well as protect their ill-gotten gains, as the changes threaten the liberty of the elite – as several high ranking politicians have found to their cost and are now in jail.
The government’s efforts to discredit and neu- tralise the DNA, which has spearheaded efforts to bring corrupt top officials and businesspeople to justice, have finally paid off. In July, the Consti- tutional Court ruled that President Iohannis must comply with a request from the justice minister that he dismiss its iconic head Laura Codruta Kovesi, widely seen as the doyen of the anti-cor- ruption efforts in the country.
Unsurprisingly, these efforts have met with criti- cism from the EU and western governments.
The latest annual Co-operation and Verification Mechanism (CVM) report issued on Romania last November warned of challenges to judicial in- dependence and a slowdown in the reform pro- cess. Bucharest’s efforts to overhaul criminal legislation later sparked an ad hoc expression of concern from the European Commission in June, which stressed that the “fight against corruption and ensuring an independent, professional judici- ary is of paramount importance”. A few days later, 12 of Romania’s international partners, includ- ing France, Germany and the US, called upon the country to consider the potential negative impact of criminal law amendments.
Another illiberal democracy
The attacks on judicial independence in Romania, and the violence at the August 10 protest, have drawn comparisons with the so-called “illiberal democracies” in the Visegrad region. Poland, like Romania, has clashed with Brussels over its judi- cial overhaul, while the values of the governments in both Budapest and Warsaw are at odds with those of the bloc. The root of these illiberal de- mocracies is the pull and push of where ultimate political power lies: in the hands of politicians