Fifteen nongovernmental organizations are concerned that the decision makers haven’t yet passed the Law on the Prosecution Service and the related legislation and that the three bills on the reformation of the national integrity system, which are to create the institutional framework and real instruments for preventing and fighting corruption, are not firmly promoted. In a public appeal, representatives of the NGOs say the delay in adopting these initiatives and the modification of the essence of these bills show that the Moldovan authorities do not want real instruments for fighting corruption to be instituted and only pretend to be interested.
In a news conference at IPN, Arcadie Barbarosie, director of the Institute of Public Policy, said the justice sector reform strategy is stagnant and is not implemented in accordance with its plan of action because there is no political will to adopt those laws that would really strengthen the judicial system and would reform the prosecution service. “When there is no political will to promote substantial, fundamental reforms, clouds of smoke appear to cover the inaction of Parliament first of all. The fact that the legislature does not work to promote these norms is the major problem,” he stated.
Nadejda Hriptievschi, program director at the Legal Resources Center of Moldova, said society is waiting for the Government and Parliament to do reforms and to implement the justice sector reform strategy. The members of civil society ask immediately adopting the bill on the prosecution service and the related legislation in the variant proposed by the working group and reallocating the posts of prosecutor, prosecution specialists and officers in the prosecution system and at the National Anticorruption Center so as to strengthen the Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office by the model of the National Anticorruption Directorate of Romania.
The NGOs also ask passing the bills on the declaration of property and personal interests and the bill to amend and supplement a number of normative documents in the version submitted to the Government by the Ministry of Justice in June 2015, naming persons to key posts in the justice sector based on professionalism and integrity, not according to political criteria, and continuing implementing the justice sector reform strategy for 2011-2016.
The public appeal made on September 29 was signed by 15 NGOs, among which the Legal Resources Center of Moldova, Amnesty International – Moldova, “Promo-LEX” Association, the Association for Participatory Democracy (ADEPT), the Foreign Policy Association, the Institute for European Policies and Reforms, and the Independent Analytical Center “Expert-Grup”.
