The ethical and financial integrity of judges and prosecutors will be subject to external assessment. The process of assessing the financial integrity will include the checking of assets and costs against the available and declared incomes and the incomes and costs of subjects’ family members. A bill to this effect was given a final reading by Parliament, IPN reports.

Under the bill, the assessment of the ethical and financial integrity will cover a number of categories of subjects, including about 140 judges – all the incumbent and acting presidents and vice presidents of common law courts and all the judges of appeals courts – and approximately 220 prosecutors, among who are the acting prosecutor general, deputy prosecutors general, prosecutors who head units or divisions, all the anticorruption prosecutors and prosecutors of the Prosecutor’s Office for Organized Crime and Special Cases, chief prosecutors and their deputies of local prosecutor’s offices and candidates for eventual vacancies of those mentioned above, who will win the contests until 2025.

Two a commissions will be constituted to conduct the external assessment of judges and prosecutors. They will consist of six members – three national and three international ones. As a result of the assessment, the commissions will compile a report on the assessment of subjects, which will be transmitted to the Superior Council of Magistracy and to the Superior Council of Prosecutors. A special panel will be created at the Supreme Court of Justice to examine the challenges against decisions by the SCM and SCP, referring to the passing or failing of the test.

The document is the third and last stage of the mechanism for conducting the external assessment of judges and prosecutors of the main institutions of the justice sector. It is one of the international commitments undertaken by the Republic of Moldova in the context of the obtaining the EU candidate status.