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Commission warns Romania over decriminalizing corruption cases

Brussels following developments ‘with great concern.’

The European Commission warned Romania Wednesday not to backtrack on fighting corruption after the government passed an emergency decree decriminalizing graft cases that cost the public purse less than €45,000.

“The fight against corruption needs to be advanced, not undone,” Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and Vice President Frans Timmermans said in a statement. “We are following the latest developments in Romania with great concern.”

Romania’s Social Democrat government adopted the decree Tuesday and also sent a bill to parliament to commute some criminal convictions for non-violent offenses — despite opposition from the president and civil society. Thousands of people took to the streets on Tuesday and Wednesday to protest against the measure.

President Klaus Iohannis had already called a referendum on the legislative package. He met Wednesday with the country’s ombudsman, who can refer the emergency decree to the Constitutional Court.

The government says the measures are meant to relieve overcrowding in prisons but critics see them as a way to let corrupt politicians off the hook.

Last week, the Commission published its annual report on the scheme that monitors efforts in Romania and neighboring Bulgaria to weed out corruption and strengthen the judiciary. It said then that passing the measures would affect assessments on whether the monitoring scheme could come to an end.

Some other EU countries have cited the fact that Romania and Bulgaria are subject to the monitoring scheme as a reason for not admitting them to the bloc’s passport-free Schengen zone.

“The irreversibility of the progress achieved in the fight against corruption is essential for the Commission to assess whether at some point monitoring … could be phased out,” Juncker and Timmermans said Wednesday.

 

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