The Extraordinary Assessment of SCJ Judges and the Establishment of the Commission for Evaluating the Integrity of Candidates for the Position of Member in the Self- administration Bodies of Judges and Prosecutors or the Risk of Enslaving the Judiciary

Abstract

In a continuous attempt to reform the judiciary in the Republic of Moldova, the Parliament and the Government have amended and adopted several normative acts that allow the evaluation of judges and prosecutors by a Commission formed by 6 members, three of them citizens of the Republic of Moldova elected by the Parliamentary majority, and the other three, foreign citizens proposed by the development partners of the Republic of Moldova. The draft Law on the Supreme Court of Justice provides in art. 13 the fact that all judges of the Supreme Court of Justice will be evaluated extraordinarily depending on the date of entry into force of this law, including those suspended. The extraordinary assessment is provided for, more recently, in the Law on the Prosecutor’s Office. These legislative changes, in addition to giving the politician direct and unconstitutional control over the judicial power, represent a surrender of sovereignty in favour of foreign states or supranational international bodies. To understand in depth the risk of implementing this system of extraordinary evaluation of judges and prosecutors, we will successively analyze the notions of sovereignty, judicial power and the principle of its independence, but also the necessity or constitutionality of implementing the extraordinary evaluation system of magistrates. Basically, we believe that an evaluation of judges and prosecutors would be opportune, but the members of such a Commission cannot be foreign citizens or persons appointed by a political body, precisely to exclude political interference in the judiciary. The political character of these normative acts but also the tendency of the executive to control the judicial power has already been sanctioned by the Constitutional Court by declaring some phrases from Law no. 26/2022 as unconstitutional.