Transparency International Moldova is concerned that by the actions to manipulate the public opinion, favorable conditions are created for declaring the Law on the Testing of the Professional Integrity unconstitutional. This will hamper the prevention and combating of corruption not only among judges, but also in the whole public sector, IPN reports, quoting a communique of the organization.
The organization says that at the end of 2013, Parliament adopted a package of laws designed to ensure the independence and to combat corruption in the legal system, civil society and the international institutions, including the Council of Europe describing it as a step forward in combating this scourge. The bills, including the Law on the Testing of the Professional Integrity, were approved by the Council of Europe.
On June 20, 2014, a group of Communists challenged the constitutionality of the Law on the Testing of the Professional Integrity, namely the provisions concerning the courts of law, in the Constitutional Court. The Court decided to ask for the appraisal of the Venice Commission. The answer of the Commission wasn’t negative, but emphasized the necessity of improving the provisions concerning the judges.
The Constitutional Court placed on its website the opinion of the Venice Commission and its translation into Romanian, adding a sentence that does not exist in the response of the Venice Commission, namely: “This law appears as a very disputable instrument whose opportunity in fighting the widely spread corruption in the public sector is disputable”. Thus, this sentence not only disapproves of the provisions concerning the testing of judges, but also extends it to the whole law that applies to several categories of public sector employees, the public opinion being misled. Afterward the mass media disseminated the message erroneously.
Given such actions, Transparency International-Moldova is concerned about the examination by the Constitutional Court of other important provisions included in the package of anticorruption laws, such as those that refer to the inclusion of the mechanism of extended confiscation and unjust enrichment in the Penal Code, whose constitutionality was recently challenged by ombudsman Tudor Lazar at the Constitutional Court.
