The Iordache Committee: Dismantling the Justice System at a Fast-Forward Pace
These are turbulent times in Romanian Politics. While Liviu Dragnea’s star seems to be, at least at first glance, waning fast the party he runs is still firmly in control of the legislative and executive branches. And while there are increased rumours of in-fighting among the Social Democrats (PSD) one thing is still clear. The ruling party and their fellow travellers are intent on controlling the justice system as well.
To this effect, Dragnea’s long-time ally and justice reform button man, Florin Iordache is now once again trying to change legislation to suit the PSD leader’s stay-out-of-jail needs. The minister of Justice under the Grindeanu government, Iordache was one of the catalysts to hundreds of thousands of Romanians taking to the streets in blistering cold weather to try to stop the dismantling of Romanian anticorruption. The ensuing protests threw a spanner in the works of the PSD and Iordache had to step down after some very visible public gaffes. Returning to his cozy spot in Parliament, Iordache watched his dead of night emergency ordinances rejected by that very body, under considerable pressure from the street. Later he had to resign, the first minister out the gate in the Grindeanu cabinet.
But as Dragnea’s legal issues failed to go away, even with the support of Senate head, Călin Popescu Tăriceanu and the Romanian Constitutional Court, Iordache now finds himself once more thrust into the limelight. Iordache, the very man whose head the streets were clamouring for, is once again in charge of justice reform, this time as head of a special committee in charge of the Justice Laws, this time being passed as regular pieces of legislation, through an expedited parliamentary procedure. It took a stunning ten days for the entire legal process in each house (a total of twenty days) to pass the most comprehensive reform (read: dismantling) of the legal system in years. Despite protests and complaints over the new legislative package from the highest magistrate body in Romania, several other independent bodies and virtually everyone in the NGO sector, it was business as usual for the newly formed Iordache Committee.
Usual, however might be a bit of a stretch, even by Romanian political standards. The Iordache Committee started its proceedings on Wednesday the 22nd of November but it quickly became clear the committee was going to be a rubber stamp disaster. An hour into the debating of the 680 page document comprising the new justice legislation and a bevy of amendments, MPs from The National Liberal Party (PNL) and The People’s Movement Party (PMP) left the room after repeatedly asking to debate procedural points and being overruled. The justice laws were being fast-forwarded through the commission. One opposition party, the Save Romania Union (USR) stayed and fruitlessly kept trying to push for debate. Even when Iordache left to, by all accounts “consult” with Dragnea and that other eminence grise, Șerban Nicolae, the meeting barrelled on, with a committee vice-chair calling the shots.
Even as the opposition was giving scathing interviews outside the ad-hoc committee’s chambers, Iordache soon returned, announcing that he had received an envelope with “suspicious white dust”. The stalwart Iordache declared that he had notified the competent authorities and returned to chair the committee even as a USR senator was announcing a constitutional challenge for several of the laws which he claimed were flawed from the first paragraph.
While the reading of amendments continued within the committee chambers, outside, PNL was preparing a written notice to the Venice Commission, the Council of Europe special Constitutional expert body. Iordache had rejected any opinion from the Venice Commission despite explicit recommendations to do so before any major legal changes in Romania’s last country report.
Iordache kept speeding through the laws, with the stated goal of getting it all done by Friday the 24th. Several new amendments were passed despite USR protests, amendments that had not been available to the public. Among them, a strict hierarchizing of prosecutors that would no longer give them independence in the pursuit of their duties, but would bind them to their direct superior’s will, and thus bound indirectly to the Minister of Justice. Also among them, a curious new amendment that would forbid the secret services from recruiting magistrates as undercover agents and would make it a crime to both offer or accept that job, a legal change fully in sync with the “parallel state” narrative pushed by Dragnea and Tăriceanu over the weekend.
Despite Iordache’s haste, when the committee closed its proceedings for the evening, at 7 PM, the MPs had not even arrived at the most controversial pieces of legislation. What they had managed to do is arouse the interest of Romania’s President who, in his sardonic style, called the whole committee proceedings a sham and likened it to a lively talk between deaf people.
The committee’s proceedings continue, under the gaze of an increasingly shaky Dragnea and the command of an ever-confident, ever-arrogant Iordache.
