“We reserved four years for the justice sector reform and we will succeed during four years,” said Minister of Justice Sergiu Litvinenco. According to him, the pre-vetting stage will be completed by the end of this year and the reform of the Supreme Court of Justice will start at the beginning of next year. Next summer, the vetting procedure will be launched to clear the system of corrupt judges and prosecutors. The minister said there are no preconditions for the justice system to experience a shortage of judges and prosecutors after the professionalism and integrity of these are assessed as the National Institute of Justice already trains new specialists, IPN reports.
The minister said the Moldovan authorities want the high-profile cases to have an end result and want the justice sector to be reformed as swiftly as possible. However, the members of the pre-vetting commission are fully independent and cannot be forced to take decisions faster.
“One cannot only push the button for correct justice to appear. We started with the cleaning of the self-managing bodies (SCM and SCP). The pre-vetting is close to an end as the first hearings are to be held at the end of September. This means that the first decisions on the passing or failing of the assessment test will be made soon. Respectively, by the end of the year we will have the self-managing bodies constituted. This is the first system cleanup stage. The reformation of the Supreme Court of Justice is the next stage and this will start in February and is to be completed in summer. The reform of the SCJ will be followed by the vetting that will last for two years,” Sergiu Litvinenco stated in the program “In Depth” on ProTV Chisinau channel.
The minister admitted that after the professional ethics and integrity are assessed, many of the prosecutors and judges will no longer be present in the system. To avoid a vacuum of labor force in courts of law and the prosecution bodies, the number of persons admitted to the National Institute of Justice was increased.
“If many leave, we need to bring judges into the system. We have 100 persons who graduated from the National Institute of Justice and are waiting for confirmation as judges and prosecutors. We significantly increased the number of those who are admitted to the National Institute of Justice. By these two methods, I think we will manage to avoid a blockage in the system, as it happened in Albania. We reserved four years for the justice sector reform and we will succeed during these four years,” stated Sergiu Litvinenco.
