Moldova to Target Corruption with New Court for Major Cases

President Maia Sandu (centre) at a Supreme Security Council meeting on March 20. Photo: Moldovan presidency website President Maia Sandu said on Monday evening after a meeting of Moldova's Supreme Security Council that a new Anti-Corruption Court will be operational within three months at most and will hear cases of crime within the judicial system as well as major corruption cases.

"We need a judiciary system that is independent of corruption, that delivers justice, to succeed in building a European Moldova and to restore people's trust in justice and their own country," said Sandu. Sandu noted that some judges had let criminals go free, and had allowed the laundering of over £20 billion of Russian money in Moldova and the so-called 'grand theft' of the billion US dollars to go unpunished. Justice reform is the primary goal of the current government in Chisinau, which has applied for EU membership for Moldova.

Six of the nine reforms that Brussels wants to be implemented by Chisinau this year relate to the justice sector. Currently, Moldovan courts take years to deliver verdicts in major corruption cases. Some defendants go free because the case drags on for so long, it passes the statute of limitations for the crime.

Sandu also stressed that she wants to speed up the election of the new members of the Superior Council of Magistracy, a regulatory and oversight body that deals with disciplinary issues and the work of judges. Last week the General Assembly of Judges decided to postpone the appointments of the members who had been chosen, evaluated and vetted by the Superior Council of Magistracy. The pro-Russian Socialists Party of Moldova, PSRM, alleged however that Sandu and the ruling Action and Solidarity, PAS party were exerting pressure on the judicial system.

"The Supreme Council of Magistracy must not turn into a political annexe of the PAS party that promotes a policy of consolidating the personal power of Maia Sandu," the PSRM said in a statement. MEP Dragos Tudorache, the rapporteur for the European Parliament on Moldova, said that tackling corruption was essential for states seeking to join the EU, but that Russia wants to maintain the status quo and prevent the reform of the justice sector. "If you want to destabilise a state, if you want to hold it back, pull it back, you encourage corruption and those who are part of a corrupt system, being careful to push buttons where necessary to keep in office those who grew and created networks of influence in such a system so important to the functioning of a state," Tudorache told TVR Moldova on Monday evening.

He explained that corruption keeps a country in a state of underdevelopment, offering Russia, which opposes EU membership for Moldova, the potential to exert influence.

"Corruption is only helping Russia with the goals that we know it has set concerning the states of the former Soviet Union," he said.