Experts recommend the Government to implement real reforms, not to compile reports and call on the European Union to more strictly supervise the technical and financial assistance provided to Moldova. Such statements were made in a roundtable meeting entitled “Implementation of the Association Agreement: progress or regression?” that was staged by Soros Foundation Moldova.
The event brought together independent experts who analyzed the public policies pursued by the Government in order to implement the Association Agreement.
Director of the Foundation’s Good Governance Department Petru Culeac said that when it signed the Association Agreement with the EU, Moldova pledged to do reforms in several key areas in order to improve the state of affairs. However, after a year of reforms, the Council of the EU expressed its concern about the lack of independence in the justice sector.
Vladislav Gribincea, president of the Legal Resources Center of Moldova, said that about ¾ of the cases managed by the Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office are actually cases of petty corruption. The real fight against corruption didn’t even start. Though there is a new law on the prosecution service, there is no guarantee that the real needs of the institution will be covered with state funds. It is useless to speak about high-level corruption if they do not start to root out corruption in the bodies that must fight corruption.
Igor Botan, executive director of the Association for Participatory Democracy, said the obscure financing of parties is the main source of political corruption. The EU recommendations say it clearly that Moldova should ensure transparency in party funding. The OSCE report compiled after the 2016 presidential elections shows that party funding remains nontransparent, while the mass media are concentrated and use administrative reuses for political purposes.
Igor Botan also said that Moldova eluded the recommendations of the Group of States Against Corruption (GRECO). Even if it was recommended that the donations made by private individuals to parties should be small, the donation cap was raised ten times in April 2015. In Moldova, a person can donate a sum equal to 200 average salaries to parties. In the EU, the cap is 2-3 average salaries a year. The problem worsens because, under the Law on Personal Data, the income sources of these generous donors cannot be made public.
Among the positive developments, the experts mentioned the regulations concerning the financial reporting by parties formulated by the Central Election Commission.
Also, Nadejda Hriptievski, programs director at the Legal Resources Center of Moldova, said the justice sector reform benefitted from the largest technical assistance from the EU and the U.S. Owing to this assistance, the hearings are recorded, the courts publish the judgments online, while the cases are distributed at random. The technical aspects in the justice sector have improved, being even better than in the countries of the region. However, an increasing number of initiatives that reduce this progress have been lately suggested.
The policy analyses were carried out within the regional project “Monitoring of progress in implementing the Association Agreement” that is implemented by Soros Foundation Moldova.
