The Republic of Moldova is among the 8 Council of Europe member countries that haven’t fully implemented the recommendations of the 4th evaluation round of the Council of Europe’s Group of States against Corruption (GRECO), which refers to parliamentarians, judges and prosecutors, IPN reports, with reference to a CoE press release.
Besides the Republic of Moldova, the report covers Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Poland, Portugal and Turkey.
In its annual report for 2023, GRECO expresses concern about the slow implementation of its recommendations on preventing corruption among parliamentarians, compared to other professional groups. It also underlines that several judicial systems must be further reformed to guarantee the independence of judges and prosecutors, and to strengthen the integrity rules that are applied to them.
Regarding its 5th evaluation round, which focuses on preventing corruption and promoting integrity among top executive functions of central government and law enforcement agencies, GRECO’s findings show that transparency, oversight and accountability remain at stake.
GRECO considers that states should ensure that their institutional and legislative integrity frameworks apply entirely and directly not only to high-level civil servants but also to ministers, their political advisers and other politically appointed staff and certain heads of state. Significant improvements are needed in areas such as adopting and implementing codes of conduct, managing conflicts of interest and lobbying, monitoring asset declarations and ensuring their transparency, limiting immunities, access to information and “revolving doors” practices.
By the end of 2023, GRECO had published reports on 21 states evaluating their compliance with its 5th evaluation round recommendations. GRECO had evaluated 21 states as part of its 5th evaluation round. According to GRECO’s follow-up reports published as of 31 December 2023, states had fully or partly implemented 58% of GRECO´s recommendations with respect to top executive functions of central governments (compared to 45% at the end of 2022). As regards law enforcement agencies, the proportion of fully or partly implemented recommendations grew slightly, from 63% in 2022 to 67% in 2023.
At the end of 2023, 54% of GRECO’s recommendations regarding MPs, judges and prosecutors had been fully implemented, 31% had been partly implemented and 15% remained non-implemented. The highest proportion of non-implemented recommendations concerned MPs (20%), compared to judges (13.5%) and prosecutors (10%).
As far as Moldova is concerned, the GRECO statistics show that only 16.7% of the recommendations on parliamentarians were fully implemented, 50% are under implementation and 33% remained non-implemented. 26.8% of the recommendations on judges were fully implemented and 71.4% were implemented only partially. Similarly, 60% of the recommendations on prosecutors were fully implemented and 40% were partially implemented. Overall, the averages are: 33.3% of fully implemented recommendations; 55.6% of partially implemented recommendations, and 11.1% of non-implemented recommendations.
GRECO is concerned that, in some countries, progress is still limited concerning the application of codes of conduct for MPs, the transparency of systems for declaring assets, and the regulation of lobbying, and insufficient progress has been made in ensuring the independence of judicial councils from the legislative and executive powers. It does note positively several areas, notably an overall improved transparency of legislative processes with meaningful public participation.
