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29th Mar 2024

Lustration comes to Romania - but will the law be applied?

  • The digitisation of the 3.5km of shelves holding the Communist files started only recently (Photo: Romania Libera)

After 20 years, Romania has finally given itself a lustration law, but the question now is whether it will ever be applied.

The law, approved on 19 May by a large majority of the members of the lower chamber of the parliament, will bar from public office, for a period of five years, people who were part of the power structures and of the repressive apparatus of Communist Romania before 22 December 1989.

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The law was criticised immediately as being both anachronistic and too late. Some deputies, mostly Social-Democrats (former Communists), have challenged it in the Constitutional Court, which will have to decide on its constitutionality in the following weeks.

But the law is also criticised for its limitations. First of all, those concerned, if they are still active, will be barred from public office only after the end of their present mandate, if they hold any. Also, the law does not affect a whole series of former officials who worked in Communist Romania‘s commercial missions abroad, or who were part of the internal financial structures of the Communist state (like the vice-president of the conservative governing party, PDL, Theodor Stolojan).

On the other hand, the law was extended to cover persons who were heading official printing houses, which is the case of the first post-Communist president Ion Iliescu.

The law is also crippled by the fact that the body charged with the study of the archives of the former secret services, the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives (CNSAS), still has no access to a huge chunk of records mostly concerning the officers and agents who are still active.

Other limitations are of an even more practical nature. If the archives of the former secret services were well kept and reasonably well organised, the same cannot be said about the archives of the Communist party. The digitisation of the 3.5km of shelves holding the Communist files started only recently and is still in a preparatory stage.

Even if some degree of order were put into them, these archives would have to be verified and examined by the personnel of the same CNSAS - a 140-strong body that which would not be able cope with the extra work.

Members of the institution have themselves pointed to the fact that decisions of this importance, having a decisive effect upon someone‘s career and public image, cannot be taken in a piecemeal way.

The 140 CNSAS researchers are still in the process of checking the files of the 50,000 candidates in the local elections and the thousands of candidates in the parliamentary elections. To this can be added the magistrates and the persons entitled to the status of a "revolutionary." This status is given to participants in the popular uprising that led to the fall of Communism in December 1989. But because the status endows a certain number of privileges, there has been a proliferation of "revolutionaries".

Until now, CNSAS has only verified the files of 1,000 magistrates (out of 5,000), and of 2,000 revolutionaries (from a total of roughly 8,000).

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