The debates held on Publika TV channel on May 30, 2018 revived a formula that was long ago specified in the reports produced by international institutions that support reforms in Moldova. That’s why it is not hard to produce an objective press digest on the content of the debate, but the process generates questions. The first question is: why do they repeat a formula that became banal in time when they speak about reforms in our country? It sounds like this: in the Republic of Moldova they adopt good laws that are yet implemented badly. Anyone can convince oneself that this finding migrated through different reports since 2005, when our country signed the European Union – Republic of Moldova Plan of Action and started to receive considerable financial resources from the development partners for doing reforms.
In fact, the first question is designed to induce another questions: who is responsible for the implementation of state policies, including reforms? The exact answer to this question can be identified in the Constitution. Article 96(1) clearly provides that: the Government ensures the implementation of the internal and external policy of the state and exercises the general management of the public administration. In this connection, it should be noted that only several months ago, ex-minister of justice Alexandru Tanase concluded that the justice sector reform strategy for 2011-2016, with all its seven pillars, failed. The given conclusion justifies the EU’s decision to stop the support for a failed justice sector reform, but also announced the start of a new reform called the small justice sector reform. The given approach served as a reason for launching a propagandistic wave designed to shift the whole blame for the failure of the justice sector reform onto one of the parties of the deceased Alliance for European Integration that managed the Ministry of Justice, freeing the coalition partners from responsibility, including the current ruling party that assumes responsibility only for what happed since January 2016. This is an approach as old as the world, which can be found in the Holy Scripture too.
But let’s see what the development partners say about this approach and its consequences. The EU progress report on the implementation of the provisions of the Association Agreement that was published this March says the new draft justice sector reform hasn’t been appropriately consulted with the interested sides and this shows the state of fact in the transparency and efficiency of the judicial process in the Republic of Moldova, which ranks 132nd out of 137 countries in the Global Competitiveness Report (2017-2018). It is evident that the quality of justice is closely related to the way in which corruption is fought, having an impact on the state of human rights. Things in this regard stand badly and an additional confirmation of this can be found in the U.S. Department of States’ Moldova 2017 Human Rights Report. Moreover, in the given context the report invokes the discrepancy between the people’s will stated in the parliamentary elections of 2014 and the reconfiguration of the political power by cruising that was probably caused by pressure and bribing.
If development partners’ reports reach such conclusions, who is yet to blame for this and why the public debates on particular TV channels overlook the given aspect? If the diagnosis of the state of fact is well known, the treatment depends on the eradication of causes, not on the camouflaging of symptoms, while the causes are mentioned correctly in the given reports. For example, in 2016 – 2018 alone, a series of very serious incidents happened and these caused damage to health or even human casualties: loud scandals of political corruption and others with the involvement of members of the ruling party. Most of these created the impression that they were treated inappropriately by the competent bodies or were solved with unordinary indulgence.
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