Law in Action in Romania, 2008–2018: Context, Agency, and Innovation in the Process of Transitional Justice (original) (raw)
Related papers
Dealing with the Securitate Files in Post-Communist Romania: Legal and Institutional Aspects
Florian Kührer-Wielach und Michaela Nowotnik (Hgg.), Aus den Giftschränken des Kommunismus: Methodische Fragen zum Umgang mit Überwachungsakten in Zentral- und Südosteuropa, 2018
In post-communist Romania, due to a series of internal and external factors, the process of dealing with the files of the communist secret police, the Securitate, has led primarily to systematic public exposure of the misdeeds of the former communist regime, which in turn has enabled informal lustration. This study explains why this peculiarity has occurred in the Romanian case.
Journal of Romanian Studies, 2020
Nearly 30 years after the end of Ceaușescu's regime, what is too long and when is too late to use public disclosures about secret police complicity in the past to influence the composition of public office holders in the present? This paper examines Romania's public disclosure measures from 2010 to the present, drawing on the reports of the Romanian secret police file repository agency-the C.N.S.A.S.-in order to better understand the temporal parameters surrounding their continued use. First, this paper shows that despite contentions that there are no more spies left to unmask, Romania's vetting process continues to disclose the collaborator backgrounds of current political candidates, at both the national and local levels, and individuals being considered for appointments in high ranking political and social institutions. Second, contrary to expectations that citizens might be too fatigued with the public disclosure process to consider them politically salient, citizen engagement with their personal files remains robust. Together, these findings suggest that preconceived temporal parameters for this type of transitional justice measure might have underestimated the duration of its utility and political relevance.
Pavel Žáček, Natálie Maráková (eds.), Memory of Nations. Democratic Transition Guide. Prague: CEVRO Institute, 2017, 48 pp., 2017
The guide is a comparative study of transitional experience from countries that underwent democratic transition in the recent past. The guide focuses on reconciliation, dealing with members of the past nondemocratic establishment, transformation of security apparatus, opening the archives and the importance of preservation of national memory. It offers a comparison of different approaches and their outcomes. The whole guide can be downloaded from the following link: http://www.cevro.cz/en/241540-download
Both academics and policy makers have criticized the manner in which Romania’s efforts to address its past have often been highly politicized, regularly thwarted by entrenched interests, overridden by various political actors, including the President and the Constitutional Court, and circumvented by former members of the nomenklatura. This begs the question, have Romania’s (extremely) flawed efforts to address the past produced any positive results? The focus of this paper will be on the use and misuse of lustration laws, file access procedures, and public disclosures as a triumvirate of related transitional justice processes. This paper examines whether and under what conditions those measures have supported or even undermined some of Romania's post communist transition goals. While a Romania only approach, or an approach comparing Romania’s experiences with the Czech or Polish experiences, could surely emphasize all that has gone wrong with Romania’s use of these transitional justice measures, this paper uses a comparison focused on regionally proximate and similar cases in the Balkans. What, if any, impact have these forms of transitional justice had on political trust in Romania as compared to the regionally proximate experiences in Albania and Bulgaria? While the focus of this paper is on trust building, corruption and democratization will also be considered in light of their importance as regional policy goals.
“Silent Lustration”: Public Disclosures as Informal Lustration Mechanisms in Bulgaria and Romania
Romania and Bulgaria have lagged behind other countries in Central and Eastern Europe in coming to terms with their communist pasts, thwarting or failing to implement lustration and public disclosure programs. However, starting in earnest in 2006-2008, their secret police file repository agencies began reviewing the former secret police files of tens of thousands of public and semi-public employees and publicly disclosing the findings. The disclosures cover a range of political and social positions, revealing the former regime complicity of many current bureaucrats, business leaders, office holders, and public personalities. There is evidence that the disclosures are catalyzing bureaucratic and moral changes similar to lustration, prompting preemptive employment vetting by employers, selective voluntary resignations by individuals to avoid disclosure, as well as an increase in citizen engagement with the secret police files. The breadth and transparency of the public disclosures suggest a type of informal lustration.
The Piteşti Syndrome: A Romanian Vergangenheitsbewältigung?
This study provides an in-depth analysis of politics of memory in post-communist Romania, focusing on the institutionalization of memory, post-communist anti-communism, "battle" for opening the archives of communism, and active remembering and forgetting.
Institute of National Remembrance Review, 2020
This article discusses the institutional attempts to deal with the archival legacy of the Romanian communist security police, Securitate (1948–1989), during the democratic transition in post-communist Romania. The first part draws a short outline of Securitate’s history and activities as one of the main power instruments of the communist dictatorship. The second part of the article shows the development of political attitudes towards institutional attempts to deal with the communist past in the post-communist Romania. This paper describes the reluctant attitude of the ruling circles in the 1990s towards the opening of the Securitate archives and the lustration attempts. The formation of the National Council for the Study of Securitate Archives (Consiliul Național pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securității, CNSAS, legally established 1999) hardly changed the general situation: the archives of the Securitate were transferred to CNSAS with significant delays, and the 2008 ruling of the constitutional court limited its lustration competences. The establishment of the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile (Institutul de Investigare a Crimelor Comunismului şi Memoria Exilului Românesc, IICCMER, established 2005) and formation in 2006 of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship.