A number of organizations and civil society representatives submitted a statement to the political class, asking the MPs to abandon the practice of depreciating the competences and professional experience created within civil society, IPN reports.

The civil society members say that following the increasing trust in civil society, as shown by polls, the MPs resorted to the undemocratic practice of erroneously and humiliatingly assessing the experience accumulated with civil society organizations. The signatories of the statement gave as example the appraisal of the professional competences of Corneliu Gurin, who was named prosecutor general and then dismissed. The special parliamentary commission ignored the substantial professional experience of expert-jurist that Gurin gained while working for two NGOs promoting democracy and the fight against corruption. The lawmakers invalidated this experience as irrelevant for the given post, it is said in the statement.

According to the signatories, Galina Bostan, who was a candidate for member of the National Integrity Commission, has an incontestable experience of ten years in the anticorruption area, but the MPs questioned her competences, invoking the disagreement with her anticorruption expert advice over a number of bills.

Also, the special parliamentary commission invalidated the considerable experience in the field of Sergiu Ostaf, Nicolae Radita, and Veronica Mihailov in the process of selecting candidates for members of the Council for Preventing and Combating Discrimination, without offering explanations. This is discrimination on such grounds as opinion and affiliation to certain social groups.

The signatories say that a large part of the current decision makers obtained qualifications within civil society. Thus, seven of the 17 members of the Cabinet (41%) and three of the seven members of the Audit Office (43%) mentioned important experience of work within civil society in their CVs. Such public institutions as the National Agency for Energy Regulation, the Center for Combating Trafficking in Persons, the embassies in the U.S. and at the UN are headed by persons with work experience within civil society.

The statement was signed by the NGO Council of Moldova, the Resource Center for Human Rights (CReDO), the Center for the Analysis and Prevention of Corruption (CAPC), the Association for Participatory Democracy (ADEPT), Young and Free, the Jurists for Human Rights, the Institute for Human Rights (IDOM), Expert-grup, and the Public Policy Institute (IPP).