Top officials in the Romanian government, including president Nicusor Dan, signalled their opposition to the Constitutional Court (CCR) decision establishing that the modified law governing the National Integrity Agency (ANI) is partially constitutional, despite amendments that would apply retroactively.

The most controversial amendment of the law, initiated by the Social Democratic Party (PSD), stipulates that elected officials in office lose their mandate within 30 days if they receive a final decision of incompatibility or conflict of interest, even if this decision predates the new law. This means that the law would apply retroactively.

In this form, the bill would target Dominic Fritz, the leader of the center-right reformist party Save Romania Union (USR), one of the main opponents of PSD. In June, Romania's High Court of Cassation and Justice upheld a Timișoara Court of Appeal ruling that found Dominic Fritz in an administrative conflict of interest. Fritz, who has held the position of mayor of Timișoara since September 2020 and is currently serving his second term, was also banned from running for office for a period of three years from the end of his current term.

The decision, handed down by the CCR on Monday, August 17, attracted a flurry of criticism. Dominic Fritz said that instead of stopping a brutal abuse of power, the PSD majority in the CCR had just validated it, and that if the president promulgates the ANI law, his mandate as mayor will end in 30 days, as a retroactive sanction for things that happened before the law entered into force. 

“Article 15 of the Constitution, ‘the law applies only to the future’, was suspended today for me. Tomorrow it can be suspended for anyone. From now on, any parliamentary majority can invent punishments for the past, tailored in the name of a political opponent, and the politically controlled CCR will rubber-stamp them,” Fritz said on Facebook.

He maintained that his conviction was handed down based on the signing of “a duplicate of a report already signed by the former mayor, on the second day at City Hall in 2020, for a PUZ prepared in its entirety before I became mayor.”

Fritz announced that he would challenge the decision at the European Court of Human Rights. 

Other criticisms of the CCR decision came from top officials in the Romanian state. President Nicușor Dan, who had challenged the law before the Court, said that his arguments were solid and that he awaits the reasoning. He further specified that in previous cases, he maintained his opinion even after the Court’s reasoning.

“After the reasoning, the law will reach Parliament for debate and only then come to me. I hope we can complete the legislative process by August 31, the PNRR deadline,” the head of state further said in the message posted on X.

Interim prime minister Ilie Bolojan, the leader of the Liberal Party PNL and a close ally of Dominic Fritz, went further than the president and denounced “political settling of scores.”

“The law applies only to the future. That is what the Constitution says. [...] Equally important, the law must not be used to remove a particular person from office or to strike at a political opponent. Until Dominic Fritz became a target, no one was concerned about such a legislative amendment and, even less so, from one day to the next. Today it is him. Tomorrow it could be someone else,” Bolojan said. 

Interim deputy prime minister Oana Gheorghiu, credited as a reformist ever since joining the Bolojan cabinet last October, also harshly criticized the Constitutional Court’s decision. 

“For corrupt politicians, deadlines are postponed for years, and judicial panels are changed until the acts become time-barred. For people who dare to fight corruption, deadlines run at full speed, and laws even produce retroactive effects,” Oana Gheorghiu said in a Facebook post.

She also referred to the case involving Ciprian Ciucu, the liberal mayor of Bucharest, currently being investigated for complicity in taking a bribe. “Unfortunately, Romanian politics is a world where, when you become inconvenient for the corrupt, accusations are invented against you and cases are fabricated. We see it today in the case of Dominic Fritz, we see it in the case of Ciprian Ciucu, we see it in the case of the democratic decisions approved by the PNL congress,” Gheorghiu concluded.

On the other side, Radu Marinescu, the former PSD minister of justice and the initiator of the “Fritz amendment,” claimed that USR and its allies want the law to apply only when it does not affect them.

radu@romania-insider.com

(Photo source: Dominic Fritz on FB and Inquam Photos|Octav Ganea)