Judicial Inspection report on Recorder documentary: prescription of files from CAB, “temporal coincidence”

The Judicial Inspection did not find any irregularity at the Bucharest Court of Appeal, following an audit carried out at this court after the Recorder disclosures, categorizing the prescription of files as “a temporal coincidence”, informs Agerpres. The Recorder investigation “Captured Justice” showed how major corruption cases are prolonged so that the accused escape conviction by statute of limitations.

“From the perspective of the activity of the Judicial Inspection, both in the matter of disciplinary responsibility and in that of thematic controls, situations have been identified in which the notion of independence of the magistrate is interpreted extensively, beyond the sphere for which it is consecrated by the Constitution and the law. This tendency, which also appears in the recent public debate, leads to confusion between the independence of the judicial function and the administrative relations inherent in the functioning of the courts. The independence of the judge is a guarantee of litigants, not a discretionary attribute of the magistrate. It is exercised within the framework of the law and the institution in which the judge works”, it is mentioned in a report of the Judicial Inspection.

IJ: “The independence of justice is not reduced to the autonomy of each judge”

According to IJ, the material published by the Recorder presents, predominantly, individual perspectives of some magistrates, related to personal experiences or execution activity.

“This approach, of an inductive type, starts from a few specific situations and transforms them into arguments for the existence of a generalized, systemic problem, without analyzing the normative, institutional and managerial framework in which those situations occurred. Press material constantly omits the fact that the independence of justice is not reduced to the autonomy of each individual judge, but assumes the existence of an organized, predictable and functional framework, in which judicial activity can be carried out effectively. In the absence in this framework, individual independence risks being transformed into a form of arbitrariness, incompatible with the idea of justice as a public service”, says the report of the Judicial Inspection, referring to the changes in the court panels.

The IJ claims that the panel changes at the Bucharest Court of Appeal were strictly administrative decisions for the proper functioning of the court.

“It also ignores the objective reality according to which a judge or a court panel resolves a significant volume of cases, and organizational measures are not adopted in consideration of a specific file. Panel changes, assignments or structural reconfigurations are not 'dedicated decisions', but administrative tools necessary for the functioning of the court. Their presentation as such, without this contextualization, feeds the false perception of an intervention on the judicial act”, justifies the Judicial Inspection repeated moves.

“A simplified and incomplete interpretation”

In addition, the report notes that the press material tends to associate the exercise of the managerial powers of the court leadership with the idea of ​​pressure on the judges, ignoring the fact that justice cannot function without a coherent organization, the independence of the judge not being incompatible with the observance of the rules of operation and the administrative hierarchy.

“The objective context of the functioning of the courts – the chronic underfunding, the lack of adequate infrastructure, the shortage of auxiliary staff and the fluctuation of human resources – is also absent from the analysis proposed by the 'Recorder'. The omission of these elements leads to a simplified and incomplete interpretation of the criticized administrative decisions”, claims the Judicial Inspectorate, which adds that, in the absence of a thorough understanding of the legal mechanisms involved and the temporal context of these cases, the solutions pronounced were sometimes presented as result of external interventions or administrative decisions, “without making the necessary distinction between legal causality and temporal coincidence”.

Thus, the mobility of judges and court organization measures would have been extrapolated as a sign of “illegitimate practices”. The Judicial Inspectorate claims that the Recorder investigation is “a partial and inductive interpretation of specific situations, detached from the normative and institutional context, this approach risks transforming legitimate organizational and management mechanisms into artificial sources of suspicion”.

The Judicial Inspection considers that the repeated changes of panels in some cases with media impact, such as those of Marian Vanghelie, Cristian Burci, Puiu Popoviciu, Nicolae Bădălău, through postings, delegations, moves to other courts, do not affect their independence, but belong to “organization and management rules”.

The Recorder's inquiry into the prescription of grand corruption cases

On December 9, Recorder broadcast an investigation about the state of justice in Romania, the phenomenon of prescriptions, but also the effects of the centralization of power at the level of “some magistrates who cohabit with politicians”. 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 evidence from 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.
• Laurentiu Beșu, judge, said that the magistrates who pronounce sentences “to suit the court leaders” do a great harm to the “thousands of honest magistrates, who make up the majority”.
• Judge Andrea Chiș, who was also in the CSM, told how she made requests to understand why the CSM itself asked for the change of “penalists”, i.e. judges “who had cases to judge”. The respective cases were resumed in the new composition of the courts, some being time-barred due to the delay even related to the decisions of the SCM!

The Recorder's investigation highlighted concrete cases in which defendants politically connected or very powerful in terms of business, such as Marian Vanghelie, Cristian Burci or Puiu Popoviciu, benefited from trials extended until the statute of limitations. The prolongation of the trials was achieved by changing the court panels by the management of the courts, including the change in the moment when the sentence was to be pronounced.