The judicial system in Moldova is fully discredited. In the same cases, the courts of law issued tens of different decisions. According to lawyer Violeta Gașițoi, this is one of the biggest problems of the Republic of Moldova. The human rights expert, who settled in the United States four years ago, in a video interview for IPN said no one bears responsibility even if we have hundreds of convictions by the European Court of Human Rights.
“Even when we were in the Republic of Moldova, we always said that our laws can be very good, but are not functional. Being outside the country now, we see things better as we can compare two systems of justice. There are two different countries with good laws that can be properly implemented. But in the Republic of Moldova nothing changed, regrettably. The situation as regards the interpretation of the legislation remained the same. This is regrettable as Moldova is indeed seen as a poor country and this poverty comes namely from the existing injustice. We do not have a legal system. We do not have medicine. We do not have a government that would want to make changes and we do not have an economy. These are the most serious problems and these things are seen,” said Violeta Gașițoi.
According to her, things related to justice, the rule of law and human rights didn’t develop even if the country benefitted from support from the development partners. “The European Union provided tranches of money to us for doing real reforms. But, owing to the state interests, these reforms were rather formal. When the Europeans came to see what was reformed, the authorities said they modified particular laws, did particular repair works in courts of law. And the reform stopped here. Given that the Europeans are not used to lying, they are very credulous. They believe the authorities as for them it is inadmissible to lie at state level, at the level of the Ministry of Justice. So, they believe these tales told by the Moldovan authorities,” noted the lawyer.
She considers the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Moldova’s duty to monitor the implementation and interpret the Constitution to be transferred to the courts of law of all levels. This way the people will gain direct access to the constitutional norms and could defend their rights by applying the Constitution directly in courts of law. Currently, the people cannot do this. No court in the Republic of Moldova directly applies the Constitution, as they do, for example, in the U.S. In the United States, the Constitution is applied everywhere. There is the Federal Constriction and also each state has the own Constitution.
“We, in Moldova, have to wait for a lot of years and to seek justice at the ECHR. We have one more problem – that the judicial precedent is not applied in the Republic of Moldova. If we had applied the judicial precedent in our country, we would have had stability and would have been able to anticipate the decisions in one case or another. This procedure is applied in the U.S. and other states as what is important is for each person going to court to be able to anticipate the solution in their case. Each investor that wants to invest particular sums of money in the Republic of Moldova, in case of disputes should enjoy predictability and should know what decision will be taken as a result of a particular conflict. The investors do not come to the Republic of Moldova namely because of the absence of judicial stability.”
---
The interview was conducted in the framework of IPN News Agency’s project “Injustice Revealed through Multimedia”. The video variant can be seen here.
