The division of magistrates by President Nicuşor Dan, the excuse found by Liana Arsenie, head of the CAB

The scandal triggered last month by the report Justiţia acapară, published by Recorder, was brought back to the attention of citizens by Euronews Romania, which conducted an interview with Liana Arsenie, president of the Bucharest Court of Appeal, in which she accuses President Nicuşor Dan of having "divided the body of judges into good and bad”.

The accusation made by Judge Liana Arsenie starts from a false premise: that President Nicuşor Dan had generated an artificial fracture within the system. In reality, the rupture was already there. It was not created by Cotroceni, but was publicly exposed by the documentary Recorder and later confirmed by the magistrates who met with the president of the country. Nicuşor Dan did not cause the separation; he became its recipient, after the internal mechanisms of justice failed to manage it.

In this context, the interview given by Liana Arsenie for the cited source should be read not as a simple institutional position, but as an act of defensive delimitation of the leadership of the Bucharest Court of Appeal against an internal conflict that has already exceeded the boundaries of the system.

"We have a political decision-maker who divides the body of judges into good and bad, of good faith and bad faith, into abusers and abused. And we stick to the idea of a political decision-maker: Mr. President Nicuşor Dan divided the judges. And it is against this background that his invitation to write about the problems in the judiciary came. When a politician, no matter who he is, makes such assessments of the judge, this is an interference in the activity of the judges. I am not making accusations, but I am establishing some realities and I am referring to some legal provisions under which we carry out our activity", states, for the cited source, Liana Arsenie, suggesting political interference in the judiciary. Except that this division was not formulated by politicians, but by magistrates, in direct testimonies about pressures, blocked careers and institutionalized fear.

The reproach addressed to President Nicuşor Dan ignores the real cause of the meeting in Cotroceni last month: the fact that part of the body of magistrates no longer feels represented by the management structures of the system.

Further, in the quoted interview, the head of the Bucharest Court of Appeal introduces an interpretation key that moves the discussion from the area of institutional responsibility to that of collective psychology. She speaks of "psychological manipulation”, of "anonymous psychological masses” that would have built a false narrative about justice.

The head of the CAB categorized the accusations against her, filed anonymously by some magistrates at the urging of President Nicuşor Dan, as "a setback for democratic society”.

"These anonymous psychological masses, in my opinion, represent a regression for democratic society. Why? A civilized and mature society means the transition from chaos to rules, it means the transition from emotions and instinct, to reason. It means the transition from anonymity to responsibility. Responsibility is the measure of the maturity of each of us. When we sign a request and when we make accusations or any kind of statements about a person, by signing we assume the reality of those reported. We are returning to a stage in which a single person could also be an anonymous whistleblower and appropriated the prosecutor's office, the prosecutor's office structure, the denunciation. He could be a witness and could also have three protected identities. Then, do we want a democratic society, attached to European values, or do we want a regression?" said Liana Arsenie, for the cited source.

She also accused the fact that the accusations of some colleagues, such as those of Laurenţiu Beşu and Raluca Moroşanu, were made "also in the same key of psychological manipulation".

"Using strong words, without evidence, which in the collective mind, give rise to strong emotions, are transgenerational dramas, such as persecution, such as fear, anxiety, abandonment, lack of support. We obviously also have characters who build this image of abuse and which arouses emotion, because they did not arouse reason. It was not accompanied by evidence", said Arsenie.

This positioning comes into direct collision with the statements of Judge Raluca Moroşanu, from the Bucharest Court of Appeal, who publicly described a climate of pressure and "terrorization" through disciplinary actions, but also with the statements given to the Recorder by her colleague, Judge Laurenţiu Beşu.

The difference in discourse is not one of nuance, but of institutional reality: on the one hand, the leadership that sees manipulation; on the other hand, magistrates who talk about concrete professional and personal costs. In this light, the magistrates' meetings with President Nicuşor Dan cannot be classified as political interference, but as a direct effect of an internal blockage. When institutional channels no longer function, exiting the system becomes inevitable. To accuse the country's president of legitimizing a division ignores the fact that the division has already been produced by the lack of response and transparency.

The reservations expressed, in the quoted interview, by Liana Arsenie towards the idea of a referendum on the Superior Council of Magistracy complete this defensive picture. "I do not know the legal text that would allow such a referendum", says the head of the Bucharest Court of Appeal, without addressing the underlying issue: the crisis of confidence in the current architecture of the self-government of the judiciary. Refusing to discuss alternative mechanisms for democratic validation does not strengthen the independence of the judiciary, but isolates it.

Taken as a whole, Liana Arsenie's statements do not calm the scandal triggered by the Recorder, but indirectly confirm it. They show a leadership more concerned with controlling the public narrative than with confronting the problems signaled from within. And when criticism is qualified as "psychological manipulation", the major risk is not the deterioration of the image of justice, but the deepening of the suspicion that the system refuses to correct itself from within.