GRECO warns: Romania has implemented only two of the 26 anti-corruption recommendations

The Group of States against Corruption (GRECO), a body of the Council of Europe, raises a new alarm regarding Romania's progress in the field of corruption prevention. According to the Compliance Report for the Fifth Evaluation Round, published this week, Romania has managed to fully implement only two of the 26 recommendations received during this evaluation round.

• Incoherent legal framework

A first criticism formulated by GRECO concerns the lack of clarity and coherence of the legislation on integrity. Thus, it is recommended to carry out an analytical study and review the legal framework to make it clearer, coherent and complete. Although the National Integrity Agency (ANI) has already published a comprehensive study, and Council of Europe experts have noted the efforts made to formulate concrete proposals, the measure is considered only partially implemented until effective legislative proposals are presented.

• Promising but unvalidated IT platform

The second important recommendation concerns the effective and regular verification of the declarations of assets and interests of persons with executive management positions. ANI presented in this regard a new big-data platform, designed to automatically detect integrity incidents. The technology, already in operation, has generated concrete and promising results, according to GRECO. However, given the recent nature of the implementation, GRECO underlines that its performance and effectiveness need to be assessed in the next report, before it can be considered fully implemented.

• Effect of CCR decisions: reduced transparency

The report also comes in the context of the decision of the Constitutional Court of Romania (CCR) on May 29, which prohibited the publication of declarations of assets and interests on the websites of ANI and other public institutions. The CCR also decided that the income and assets of spouses and children should no longer be included in these declarations, further reducing the level of transparency.

• Only two recommendations fully implemented

According to GRECO, Romania has fully implemented only two of the 26 recommendations formulated within the Fifth Evaluation Round, regarding the prevention of corruption and the promotion of integrity at central level and in law enforcement institutions. Another 22 recommendations are considered partially implemented, and two have not been addressed at all to date.