Witch-Hunt or Moral Rebirth? Romanian Parliamentary Debates on Lustration (original) (raw)

Lustration in Romania: The Story of a Failure

Since 1989, lustration has figured prominently among the methods post-communist Eastern Europe used to deal with its recent past. While to date the literature has recognized that countries like the former Czechoslovakia, Germany, Albania and, more recently, Poland, have screened electoral candidates and / or members of the judiciary, the army and the police forces, in order to remove officials with a tainted past from post-communist politics, Romania has been dismissed as a country which consistently rejected lustration. However, calls for the removal of communist officials and secret political police agents were voiced soon after the Revolution of December 1989, and the measures they called for were more comprehensive both in terms of the social categories subjected to and the time period of the ban. This article is the first in-depth analysis to examine the lustration demands included in the Timisoara Declaration, explain the reasons why they received a cold shoulder from formatio...

Witch-hunt or Moral Rebirth?

East European Politics and Societies: and Cultures, 2011

Lustration was not legislated in Romania to date, but it was discussed by deputies and senators of all ideological persuasions, especially from 2005 to 2007. Declarations delivered in front of the house, interventions during debates of lustration-related draft bills and contributions to a parliament-sponsored public discussion reveal that for Romanian legislators lustration can bring about moral cleansing and a break with the past, provide retributive justice for victims of communism, facilitate elite replacement, prevent future violence, and help countries enjoy the benefits of European Union accession, although it punishes valuable individuals, runs against European values, is impractical and unconstitutional.

Hidden Continuities?: The Avatars of “Judicial Lustration” in Post-Communist Romania

German Law Journal, 2021

This Article grapples with the instrumentalization of the past in Romania, in the specific context of “judicial lustration” measures. It argues that decommunization and lustration policies, which could not be pursued in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of state socialism in 1989, were weaponized much later and used in order to advance other purposes. In 2006, an expedited judicial vetting procedure, in the context of the EU-driven fight against corruption, was repurposed by the center-right as a lustration instrument. In the same year, the dismantling of an intelligence service created after 1991 in the Justice Ministry (SIPA) to monitor ‘vulnerabilities’ in the justice system has set in motion a long series of failed attempts to bring closure to the question regarding the service’s archives, fomenting continuities of suspicion until today. More recently, in 2018, a form of ‘mock-judicial lustration’ has been used by the political left to deflect or at least delegitimize repr...

Late lustration programmes in Romania and Poland: supporting or undermining democratic transitions?

Democratization, 2009

In 2006, Poland and Romania embarked on renewed lustration programmes. These late lustration policies expanded the scope and transparency measures associated with lustration as a form of transitional justice. While early lustration measures targeted political elites, late lustration policies include public and private sector positions, such as journalists, academics, business leaders, and others in 'positions of public trust'. Given the legal controversy and moral complexity surrounding lustration, why lustrate so late in the post-communist transition and why expand the policies? The dominant explanation is that lustration is a tool of party politics and is a threat to democratic consolidation. However, the late lustration programmes do not fit this hypothesis neatly. The new laws have been restructured and packaged with other reform programmes, specifically anticorruption programmes. Late lustration has evolved to include economic and social, as well as political concerns. As such, some post-communist governments in Central and Eastern Europe appear to be trying to use lustration as a way to further the democratic transitions by addressing remaining public concerns about corruption, distrust, and inequality.

Explaining lustration in Central Europe: a ‘post-communist politics’ approach

Democratization, 2005

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Morality in Politics, or the Politics of Morality?“Neo-Purification” in Romania

My lecture will address the problem of retributive justice under post -communism. What happens when the principle of proportional responsibility becomes meaningless and 'convenient truth' gives birth to 'convenient justice'? What is the proper relationship between ethical culpability, legal responsibility and politics in a free society? the traumatic past, we have to bury it, to make proper funerals, but what to bury once we know very little about the past? To join Europe also meant cleaning up the dirt of the past, in order to morally and/or politically cure society from its impurities. I do not speak about "impure people" here, but about the necessary distance from our moral failures as human beings during the communist regime. In the following presentation I'll try to argue how the main result of the recent "cleansing" meant not more morality in politics, but the politisation of morality.

THE MISUSE OF THE LUSTRATION PROCESSES IN THE POST-COMMUNIST TRANSITIONS IN EUROPE

Iustinianus Law Review Special Issue – Conference Proceedings (2019), 2019

The fall of the Berlin Wall opened the gate to democracy for the post-communist countries in Europe. However, the road towards democracy in all post-communist countries in Europe proved to be very difficult. One of the main questions on the road towards democracy in these countries was the question what to do with the problematic communist totalitarian past: to forgive and forget or to punish and remember. Most of the post communist countries in Europe decided to punish and remember their communist past. That is why 14 post-communist countries in Europe decided to implement the process of lustration in order to confront this communist past. Taking that into consideration, we can say that the lustration processes were frequently used in the process of facing the communist past in Europe. However, very often in theory is stressed out that the process of lustration is one the most controversial mechanism of transitional justice. Many authors warn that lustration hides the danger of political discredit and revenge. These types of claims during the post-communist transition have become reality in a several post-communist countries in Europe (Albania, Poland, Macedonia). In these post-communist countries the process of lustration was used as a weapon in the hands of the ruling political elites against their political opponents, a weapon that needed to strengthen the position of the ruling political parties and marginalize their political opponents. At the end, the process of lustration has had very negative impact at the democratic consolidation of these countries instead of a positive one. That is why the subject of this paper will be the way the lustration processes were misused in the post-communist countries in Europe. The main methods that are used are the following: method of analysis, historical, normative and political method. The overall conclusion is that the process of lustration was very often misused by creating lustration laws that covered positions in the private sector too, by creating lustration laws that covered periods after the fall of the communist regimes and by creating lustration laws that violated the basic human rights of lustrated individuals (the right to a fair trial, the right to respect of private and family life etc) Key words: politics, political system, democracy, transition, lustration, post-communist countries.

Questioning Anticorruption in Postcommunist Contexts. Romanian MPs from Commitment to Contestation

Südosteuropa, 2018

The outbreak of corruption scandals involving elected officials has raised criticism concerning the quality of parliamentary representation in Romania. The public image of the legislature rapidly became that of a ‘reactionary gathering of criminals’, persons who use public office in order to cover abuses of power and office. The core contestation of the legislature aimed above all at the usage by parliament of its constitutional privileges and immunities in order to postpone / impede criminal investigations against members of the legislative. Starting from the analysis of the parliamentary speeches of the members of parliament (MPs) under criminal investigation on corruption charges, this paper focuses on the evolving dynamic of acceptance and contestation with respect to the implementation of anticorruption policies. The paper highlights, based on the analysis of the justifications put forward on the occasion of parliamentary hearings, the gradual configuration of a trans-partisan ...