The Commission considered the views of Transparency International Romania presented during the consultations

Transparency International Romania welcomes the report on Romania's progress under the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism published today by the European Commission and appreciates that this is one of the few reports that reflect Romania's situation as close to the reality of its taxpayers as citizens or private companies. Beyond the appearance of a neutral tone and weighted criticisms, TI-Romania considers that the issues criticized in the Report are extremely important and in the absence of a systematic approach to solving them risks to affect the credibility and sustainability of the reforms.

 A first aspect concerns the imminent entry into force of the new Criminal Code and the new Code of Criminal Procedure, which, as TI-Romania has repeatedly raised, raises a problem of lack of capacity, even if some measures have been taken To improve the conditions of entry into force and resources of the judiciary to implement two new institutions: the judge of rights and freedoms and the preliminary chamber judge, as well as an avalanche of non-uniform application of the new provisions and requests for Review of the more favorable criminal law from the perspective of the new institutions set out in the General Part of the Code, both of which risk leading to the blocking of the new criminal procedural system.

Another correct aspect of the Report is the still inconsistent practice of the prosecutor's offices and courts as a result of the resilience of some magistrates in following the decisions of the High Court, leading to significant business-related damage caused by the settlement time And the lack of predictability of solutions, with a direct impact on the credibility of the system. On the other hand, the Report states that there are still situations where the independence of the judiciary is affected by political declarations and interferences in the system of appointment of management positions in the system. TI-Romania considers that the solution to both problems lies in the development of a balanced system that ensures both independence and accountability of magistrates for their professional conduct both at the level of civil and criminal courts and at the level of prosecutor's offices, non-unitary practices and discretionary approaches Lead to impunity before the law. The phenomenon of impunity before the law appears endemic in the counties, where the vigilance of the press and the capacity of NGOs is lower and where the authority of the authorities manifests more aggressively against the citizens. These issues, both in terms of conditionality 1 and conditionality 4, were less debated by the report, although this is the most serious problem of the rule of law and anticorruption on the citizen's agenda.

In this context, TI-Romania welcomes the Commission's recommendation "Equal Justice for All" as a key request and a first acknowledgment that in Romania there were and exist different units of measure for similar conditions.

   Regarding the progress made in the control of conflicts of interest, incompatibilities and declared wealth, the internal situation denotes on the one hand a still limited understanding of the concepts of the persons subject to the regime and, on the other hand, a major interest in circumventing or even The repeal of these provisions, proof of which is the amendments to the Criminal Code adopted on 10 December 2013, which also aimed at amending the offense of conflict of interest. We recall that the exercise of power demonstrated on December 10, 2013 showed that it does not matter the political color of the majority who vote for as long as the subject of the vote benefits everyone.

In a situation similar to the one outlined above, there is also the Code of Conduct for Members of Parliament, a code whose adoption has been running since 2012 and which has been the subject of dedicated Commission monitoring at that time. Unfortunately, his failure to adopt at that time - when there was a political stake for winning the election - led not only to the process but also to a significant dilution of the provisions, so that the end of 2013 work is far from To be a document that would ensure parliamentary ethics or even an irreproachable conduct in relation to respect for other powers in the state, as the Report also mentions.

The latter is just one of the examples for which TI-Romania has consistently called for the Commission's reports to take into account the real measure of the adopted reforms - namely to address their impact rather than the paper existence of them. In this respect, the introduction of the Report mentions that, over time, attention to the monitoring process has been translated into the 'impact of reforms'. It is regrettable, however, that civil society's demands in this area are heard 7 years after the entry into force of the CVM.

Despite the fact that the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism in its current form does not contain impact assessment indicators, this year's Report explicitly mentions that the effectiveness of anti-corruption efforts is above all the prestige of institutional leaders called to implement the National Anticorruption Strategy, Level of all public sector institutions at central and local level.

In this context, Transparency International Romania is launching political leaders, leaders of judicial and commercial structures to invite a new national objective to provide the real measure of Romania's commitment and progress in anti-corruption: that by 2025, Perceptions of Corruption in Romania to rise from 43 points to close to 70 points.