[“Don't take it personally, Mr Muruianu, but we expected you to step down”] After tiresome hours of hearings and debates on Friday, February 26, Parliament Speaker Mihai Ghimpu announced the case of Supreme Court chief Ion Muruianu adjourned over a lack of quorum as the opposition Communist faction left the assembly hall, followed by ruling coalition lawmakers who thought that 9:00 PM – that's when the meeting ended – was too late for anything to be decided. Justice Ion Muruianu was summoned to appear before Parliament to provide explanations for the cases lost and pending before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and for the state of the judiciary in general, after Moldova's representative to ECHR Vladimir Grosu reported that the number of applications filed with the Court against Moldova rose in 2009 by some 80 percent from the previous year. Speaking before Parliament, Grosu said that 3,350 cases against Moldova are currently pending before the ECHR, as most of the complaints deal with defective access to justice and failure to enforce court decisions. While admitting that the number of lost cases was indeed high, the chief justice argued that “our judicial system is no worse than others”, suggesting that other countries in the region lost more cases than Moldova despite having smaller populations and a greater number of judges. Ion Muruianu also argued that the Supreme Court was responsible for only 53 cases out of 173 lost in Strasbourg. At the same time, the chief justice recognized that some 100 out of 440 national judges had “a history with the ECHR”. Muruianu somewhat excused those judges by saying that they hadn't had access to the Interne until 2009 and had been unable to study the European case law. But now, “the ECHR taught the judges a lesson”, added Muruianu. After this speech, Mihai Ghimpu, parliamentary speaker and concurrently Moldova's acting president, demanded that Justice Muruianu be sacked. “The number of cases lost by Moldova at the ECHR started rising with the appointment of Ion Muruianu as Supreme Court President in March 2007. Moldova was ordered to pay damages of 2.7 million euros. It's the Supreme Court we are talking about! What kind of judges are there? Don't blame it on the Internet!”, fumed Ghimpu. The caretaker president also spoke of the alleged abuses of the investigative judges in the police stations during and after last April's events. “Don't take it personally, Mr Muruianu, but we expected you to step down. But since you decided otherwise, I'm demanding your dismissal. Surrender your seat to someone who will help us accomplish our European integration goals”, declared Ghimpu. Other lawmakers also criticized the judiciary and demanded Muruianu's dismissal, recalling his vitriolic remarks of the journalists, whom he called “junkyard dogs”. At the same time, the Communist faction said the intention to sack Muruianu was an attempt by the Alliance for European Coalition to take control of the judiciary. “These hearings have just one goal – to discharge a person whom the liberal-democrat government regard as inconvenient. (...) The Communist faction considers this to be a grave interference with the judiciary, which contradicts the constitutional and international norms. Muruianu has a 4-year mandate, and Parliament has no right to discharge him”, declared Communist MP Anatol Zagorodnyi. After his speech, the opposition faction staged a walkout. This gave Prime Minister Vlad Filat an opportunity to say that it became “clear who protected him (Ion Muruianu). We've seen them support each other in statements and decisions (...) Dear chief justice, our goal is to ensure our society with a judiciary that would administer justice. Our interest was the state of the Moldovan judiciary, and not irrelevant comparisons with other countries”. Other officials that spoke of the state of the judiciary before Parliament on Friday were Dumitru Visterniceanu, the president of the Superior Council of Magistrates, and General Prosecutor Valeriu Zubco.