A change in the judicial system is definitely needed, but the maturity and actions should come from inside, say representatives of courts of law from southern Moldova. According to them, the legal framework does not stipulate that the judges should be assessed by foreign specialists. There are legal provisions and domestic institutions empowered to fight corruption and to determine the integrity of judges. The issue was developed in debates on the strategy for ensuring the independence and integrity of the justice sector for 2021-2024 that was held on the parliamentary platform, IPN reports.
Cahul Appeals Court president Ruslan Petrov said that when analyzing the international corruption fighting practice, he didn’t find any state in which foreign forces would have become involved to trigger beneficial changes. “I know the example of the highly developed countries in which the political factor, the government, the judiciary set themselves the goal and made enormous changes at the domestic level and achieved great results,” he stated.
Ruslan Petrov said he does not think the assessment, in general, will change something. “If the Prosecutor’s Office and the National Anticorruption Center start work and carry out assessments in strict compliance with the law, devoting maximum attention to the fight against corruption, the effect will be much greater. There should be discovery, proving, punishment, execution. This is the best effect,” noted the judge.
Cahul Court vice president Mihail Bușuleac said the Superior Council of Magistracy in the recent period took a number of measures to launch the “cleaning process”. “There were instituted disciplinary proceedings. The National Integrity Authority more often checks the property of judges, criminal cases are started and the process is continuous. We see that the integrity control mechanisms applied to the players from the justice secret exists and is active,” stated Mihail Bușuleac, noting the idea of an extraordinary assessment appeared when the “state capture” was declared and during the two years that passed since then, the law was amended, the process was started and can be continued at the internal level.
Comrat Appeals Court judge Dmitrii Fujenco noted that the goal of this assessment should be clear and, if this goal is to remove 80% of the judges from the system, this should be said clearly. “Does someone need blood? Someone may consider that by replacing the current judges with specialists who are new in the system, the situation will change essentially, but I don’t think so,” he stated.
The strategy for ensuring the independence and integrity of the justice sector for 2021-2024 and the action plan for implementing it were agreed by Parliament at the end of last November. The documents were adopted by the votes of the Socialist and For Moldova MPs, but weren’t promulgated by the President, who argued that the document should envision the mechanism for the external assessment of judges and the launch of viable reforms in the anticorruption system.
