The first message from the judiciary that breaks the “common front” from the top, after the Recorder documentary
Photo: Inquam Photos / Octav Ganea
The section for prosecutors of the Superior Council of Magistracy says that “the link between possible system problems, which must be checked immediately”, and the changes made to service pensions “is only a conjunctural one and can only lead to the manipulation of public opinion and to the derailment of the purpose of the Recorder material”. The message of the prosecutors is totally different from that of the judges of the CSM, who accused a campaign of “destroying trust in the justice system” and qualified as “allegations” the testimonies of some magistrates in the documentary “Captured Justice”.
The section for prosecutors of the Superior Council of the Magistracy says, in a press release sent on Thursday, that if the facts presented in the Recorder documentary were true, “it could lead to the conclusion that the judicial system, in whole or in part, has abdicated from its legal and constitutional purpose.”
The prosecutors of the CSM say that they will take steps to verify, “in accordance with the institutional role”, the reality of the conclusions of the Recorder documentary on the activity of the prosecutors.
“Successive changes to justice laws have upset the activity of prosecutors' offices”
“The prosecutors within the department have shown several times to the ministers of justice and other political decision-makers, in the 3 years since the beginning of the mandate, that it is necessary to review some provisions of the laws of justice, some of them in the sense of those captured in the content of the material.
Successive changes to justice laws in the period 2017-2022 disrupted the activity of prosecutors' offices, both in the area of criminal investigation and representation before the courts, as well as in the areas of management and administration.
The connection between possible system problems, integral or sectoral, which must be checked immediately, and the recent changes regarding the status of magistrates, referring here to service pensions, is only a conjunctural one and can only lead to the manipulation of public opinion and to the derailment of the purpose of the Recorder material”, states the Prosecutors' Section of the CSM.
“With regard to the possible political positions of some organizations or parties, we see the fact that, regardless of the political rotation of the last 8 years, it was not desired that the reported legislative deficiencies be removed in the sense of those reported by the members of the judicial system in accordance with the recommendations of the Venice Commission, the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism and the European mechanism rule-of-law. In this sense, any correct intervention on the reported problems will have to contain, compulsorily, the requested legislative changes, to regulate the system problems”, adds the Section for Prosecutors of the CSM.
“Captured Justice”
The documentary “Captured Justice” was published on Tuesday evening by the Recorder on its YouTube channel.
The film is an investigation about the state of justice in Romania, the phenomenon of statutes of limitations, but also the effects of the centralization of power at the level of “some magistrates who coexist with politicians”.
The Recorder documentary had a higher audience peak on TVR 1 than all TVR shows since 2025, minus the presidential election debate / How many Romanians watched “Captured Justice” / Controversy on the broadcast
In the Recorder documentary, the military prosecutor Liviu Lascu, Crin Bologa, the former chief prosecutor of the DNA between the periods of Laura Codruța Kovesi and Marius Voineag, but also a prosecutor from the DNA and a judge from the Court of Appeal, who spoke anonymously, were interviewed.
Claudiu Sandu, representative of the prosecutors in the CSM, said that the excessively formal interpretation of the law led to the annulment of the evidence in the file “for anything”, for what he metaphorized as “a comma”.
“We ended up reinventing the law,” said Sandu, who said that “I don't remember a big guilty verdict lately.” The massacre of the idea of justice, said Sandu, demobilizes the magistrates and disarms the citizens.
In the first reaction after the Recorder documentary, the section for judges of the CSM accuses an “intensification of the campaign to destabilize the judicial power” and “a well-established plan” / “Appeal to society”
