The creation of specialized courts for corruption cases in accordance with a proposal submitted by the Center for the Judicial Sector Reform is unnecessary, consider representatives of a number of nongovernmental organizations. In a public appeal concerning the reformation of the judicial system, the NGOs say it seems that by creating such courts the authorities actually want to postpone the reforms that would have a real impact on the fight against corruption, such as the strengthening of the Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office and the limitation of its duties to combating large-scale corruption.
Nadejda Hriptievschi, program director at the Legal Resources Center of Moldova, in a news conference at IPN said they invoke the non-uniform judicial practice and the disputable individualization of punishments for acts of corruptions in support of this proposal. But Moldova already had economic courts that turned out to be sources of corruptions. “The smaller the court is and the narrower the specialization of the judge is, the easier for third persons is to influence the judges,” she stated.
According to Nadejda Hriptievschi, the creation of a specialized court of law and boards within the Courts of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Justice will not help solve the problem at the Supreme Court, which continues to have a non-uniform practice, including on cases of corruption. If the goal is to make the judges experts only in cases of corruption, this can be done easier by ensuring the specialization of judges of common law courts in penal and civil cases, without founding separate courts.
The program director also said that the inefficient investigation is a key problem in corruption fighting in Moldova. Therefore, the draft law on the prosecution service and the related legislation should be immediately adopted so as to create the conditions needed for fighting corruption by professionally investigating the cases of corruption, not by distracting attention at the final stage of the investigation.
The public appeal, which was signed by 15 NGOs, the decision makers, especially the Government and Parliament, are asked not to allow departures from the previously assumed objectives and not to promote in a hurry initiatives that can become dangerous in the conditions existing in Moldova. Among the signatories are 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”.
