Civil society recommends depoliticizing law enforcement bodies

A number of civil society organizations of Moldova launched a public call to the lawmakers, asking that they depoliticize and democratize the law enforcement bodies, Info-Prim Neo reports. “We are concerned about the fact that no institutional reform is implemented at the Security and Information Service and that the institutional reforms at the Ministry of the Interior, the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Center for Combating Corruption and Economic Crime are implemented at a very slow pace,” the director of the Resource Center for Human Rights (CReDO) Sergiu Ostaf said in a news conference on Thursday. According to him, the recent public discussions that centered on the law enforcement bodies revealed that the political class focuses mainly on hirings and firings rather than on systemic changes and institutional reforms. Sergiu Ostaf said the depoliticization of the law enforcement bodies and of the procedure for naming their administration and the ministerial depoliticization can be ensured by rationalizing the entire decision-making process in a transparent and substantiated way. “The institutional depoliticization can be guaranteed by regulating the activity of the law enforcement bodies exclusively by the laws adopted by Parliament, avoiding secondary normative regulations, while the political independence of the hiring process can be ensured by introducing standards for assessing the individual performance, by paying decent salaries and implementing modern technology,” said Sergiu Ostaf. The director of the Public Policy Institute Arcadie Barbarosie said the Alliance for European Integration maintained the existing system, when the parties tend to name their representatives as managers of law enforcement bodies. “Politicization means protecting the interests of the players who support the party. The law enforcement institutions, as in the period of the Communist government, are used to denigrate the political opponents. The slogan “The change until the end” remained a simple slogan. There is no political will to bring the initiated reforms to an end. How long should the voters wait? If we are unable to carry out our own reforms, we can copy those who did it,” said Arcadie Barbarosie. He stressed that only society can make the politicians implement the recommendations as regards the depoliticization and democratization of the law enforcement bodies by the given votes as this is the mechanism whereby the people express their wishes in a democracy. The call to the lawmakers was launched by the Resource Center for Human Rights, the Public Policy Institute, the Moldova Institute for Human Rights, and the Human Rights Information Center.