US ambassador: Justice changes in Romania threaten to turn back clock to early 2000s

The accumulated changes to the country’s justice system “threaten to turn back the clock to the early 2000s, when the Romanian judiciary was plagued by corruption and political influence,” US ambassador Hans Klemm said in a speech delivered at the Faculty of Law of the University of Bucharest on October 1. The ambassador referenced several changes that could leave the local justice system “significantly dismantled in less than a year.” He pointed to the amendments lowering the retirement age for judges and prosecutors from 25 years of service to 20. While raising the total post-university training of magistrates from three to six years, these amendments will temporarily stop the flow of new magistrates into courts, the ambassador explained. “It is difficult to see how an already overburdened judicial system will successfully deal with this immediate loss of institutional knowledge, combined with a years-long staffing gap,” he said. He also pointed to accumulating evidence that magistrates are increasingly targeted politically and in the media for court decisions and public opinions that political leaders perceive as endangering their private interests or legislative agenda. “The record of the Judicial Inspectorate over the last year and a half is especially difficult to understand in any context other than that it has become subject to political manipulation. For those magistrates who have not already been intimidated, new judicial legislation creates greater opportunities to coerce and punish troublesome magistrates, through a more powerful Judicial Inspectorate and a newly created prosecutors’ office designed solely to prosecute judges and prosecutors,” the ambassador said. The criminal code and criminal procedure code amendments passed by the Parliament this summer also threaten the progress made by Romania’s justice system. “Cloaked in the mantle of concern for due process and human rights, some of these changes are a clear attempt to protect vested interests from an independent judiciary. If promulgated in their current form, some of these amendments will make the investigation and prosecution of the crime, from murder to complex organized crime cases, unwieldy or impossible,” Klemm explained. The same amendments would also reduce international cooperation because of concerns about sharing information with the Romanian law enforcement, the ambassador said. Klemm also spoke of the Parliament which, in the process of making the changes, “has turned inward and closed itself off” and ignored several opinions and recommendations, including from the Superior Council of Magistracy and the Venice Commission. “Arguing the need for haste, and that sufficient consultation with stakeholders has already occurred, the Romanian Parliament has ignored, among other counsel, the opinions of the Superior Council of Magistracy, a signed petition of the majority of Romanian magistrates, and written guidance of independent international legal experts from the Venice Commission, the European Commission, and the Group of States Against Corruption,” the ambassador said. At the same time, Klemm spoke of the maturity reached by Romanian magistrates, who have been protesting the changes to their profession and attacks against them. “Romanian magistrates appear to have reached a level of maturity, confidence, and independence such that they will not easily allow the justice system to regress or retard. Magistrates have protested legislation affecting their profession and attacks against them in a manner that would not have been thinkable only a decade ago. […] This demonstrates a confidence and integrity that suggests that the judicial system may be mature and adequately resilient to survive the current onslaught,” Klemm said.