The judge of CCR Iuliana Scântei explained the annulment of the presidential elections. “I am sorry that the CCR did not find the opportunity to apologize to the voters.” She said not the vote of the people was sanctioned, but the facts of a competitor

On Tuesday, in Râșnov an unexpected moment took place. From the public, someone asked the judge of CCR Laura-Iuliana Scântei to explain the cancellation of the presidential elections of November 24, 2024, the same theme of which the foreign minister Oana Țoiu recently said to Euronews That it cost us US visa program, because we could not offer partners with detailed explanations.

On Tuesday, a debate on the reform of justice was held at the Film Festival and Histories. The discussion was moderated by the anti -corruption expert Laura Stefan. A participant in the room addressed Iuliana Scântei, former PNL parliamentary and one of the nine judges who decided to annul the elections explained the RCC responsibility in making the decision.

• The first tour of the presidential Aegents of 2024 took place on November 24, 2024 and were won by the independent Călin Georgescu, followed by the USR candidate, Elena Lasconi. The second round, scheduled for December 8, did not take place, after the RCC canceled the election on Friday, two days before. In the diaspora, the Romanians were already voting for the second round.

Why did the CCR take the file

The judge explained, for the beginning, why the case reached the RCC.

“The court has a unique jurisdiction. A single electoral process was entrusted, by the Constitution, to verify the legality and confirmation of the result, to the RCC: the electoral presidential process. The rest of the elections were entrusted for legality control to the common law courts,” the judge explained.

The judge of the spark wanted to present what he called “personal observations”. He said he thought of this case for a long time.

“The cases of fraud carried out on the day of voting represent what you can notice about the illegality of an electoral process,” sparks said. And the effects of such a fraud must have “a certain magnitude, respectively to be so great fraud that it will lead to the change of the order of the candidates or to alter the final result.”

“The court had a decision in which he found that there were no fraud on the day of voting, to be challenged by a competitor”, clarifies the spark.

And then why did they pronounce?

The correctness of the elections is not a matter of a day

The CCR judge explained that the declassified documents of the Supreme Council of Defense of the Country (December 4, 2024) presented several irregularities related to the electoral process, especially in the election campaign.

He personally decided to rule, considering that in the case of elections the correctness is not only a matter of 24 hours, a strict analysis of the election day. The electoral process and, therefore, its correctness, refers to a longer period of time, argued the judge in front of the public.

And for the decision they relied on what CSAT found, explained the spark.

The judge of the spark: the CCR “took as truthful” the CSAT conclusions

“The CCR has no competences to analyze the way in which other state authorities carry out its legal attributions, nor the competence to verify on how CSAT has reached a certain finding:” they have affected the presidential electoral process “, says the spark about the RCC in the annulment of the elections.

She said that CSAT documents are taken as “truthful and enjoy authenticity”.

After the publication of the CSAT documents, “it was the discussion about self -assessment, and the Court had a rigorous analysis on what it means to observe the procedure for choosing the president and if this refers only to the day of the vote. The procedure starts from establishing the date by the Government and a continuous action,” she says.

If the CCR had not decided to cancel the elections based on the desecretized documents, then it would have validated “something that was not according to the law”.

“I am sorry that the CCR did not find the opportunity to apologize”

According to the law, the elections are defined by three mandatory criteria: free, periodic and correct. They were free, because people were able to vote for the desired, but also periodic candidate, because they took place on the set date.

“The” correct “character remained in the analysis, which concerned the legal character. What mattered was that the exercise of the law should be in accordance with the law, because this gives the correct character,” the spark of the man who asked.

From the CSAT documents, which showed how the election campaign was vitiated, “we did not sanction – and I am sorry that the CCR did not find the opportunity to explain to the people and to ask us – no voter for how he voted, but for the fact that a competitor did not comply with some obligatory normative acts,” the judge said.

She said, regarding the methods used today in election campaigns, including those on the Internet, and that “the world moved faster than the national legislation and the duties of the authorities in the field.”

Spark says CCR has no responsibility to find evidence

After the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, explains the judge, the law for national security was amended. It was completed with two categories of new national risks, “which were happening under our eyes”: the hybrid war and state and non-state actions of propaganda and misinformation, “where it was not the area of expertise of the RCC”.

Thus, the finding and identification of the evidence “came back to the institutions in the field of national defense and safety”, explains Laura-Iuliana Scântei. “What was of our competence was to capitalize on their conclusions from the perspective of affecting the constitutional order.”

“We concluded that the electoral process had to be stopped, because it was vitiated in the forms in which other authorities showed. Maybe other authorities should have intervened and detail back. We said how the constitutional order was affected, but some more complete answers had to come,” the judge concluded.

Laura-Iuliana Scântei was a counselor in the Tariceanu Government, between 2006 and 2007, then deputy secretary general at the Ministry of Justice until October 2008, according to its CV. From 2008 to 2022 she was a public notary and senators chosen on PNL lists in 2016-2022. From June 2022 he holds the position of judge at the CCR.