The Ministry of Justice proposed a bill concerning the assessment of the integrity of judges and prosecutors for consultations. According to the action plan, the legislative proposal will be finalized in April and will be submitted to the Venice Commission for appraisal in the second half of May, IPN reports.

The Ministry on February 25 will organize public consultations that will involve all the interested sides. In the first half of March, there will be held discussions with prosecutors and judges, but separately. Common discussions will be staged later. Public discussions will be held with representatives of civil society and the development partners.

The bill on the assessment of judges was one of the three documents that were submitted to the Council of Europe at the start of this January. While in Chisinau on a visit, CoE experts recommended the Government of the Republic of Moldova to ensure a veritable process of public discussions on the bills with all the interested sides, including judges and civil society.

Earlier, the assessment of prosecutors was removed from the justice sector reform bill and Minister of Justice Fadei Nagachevski said the prosecutors will be assessed by the judge assessment model. According to him, it is technically very hard to draft two sets of documents when there is a reform in two systems. “The Ministry of Justice has limited technical capacities. Given the complexity of the two sectors, justice and the prosecution service, we decided to target first the justice system as this is very sensitive. Furthermore, there are elements of judge independence that we should coordinate with our development partners,” the minster stated a month ago.