Corrupt Romanian judges

 "The ongoing fallout from investigative reports exposing systemic networks of elite magistrates—who use administrative reassignments to intentionally delay top-tier corruption trials past their statutes of limitations—continues to plague Bucharest. Public distrust in the independent judiciary remains at a staggering 70%." News item today. 

Indeed it is staggering that 30% of the people do not express distrust in the judiciary. This is deeply shocking. 

I was speaking yesterday to a very senior competition lawyer who told me that if she no longer believed that the Romanian justice system did justice, she would stop being a lawyer. 

It showed a very good heart on her part but it also seemed to me completely incredible that she should say that. 

Competition law is much cleaner than other parts of other areas of law, to be fair to her. 

It is something very important to the European Union because it concerns the major international companies and it's very carefully scrutinised. The judges, unlike in most areas of law, are well educated in this area of the law. The room for bribing judges is very small as most of the firms that work in this area are either international firms or very well-known and famous Romanian firms. 

When I came to this country in the 1990s, I spent a lot of time talking to lawyers and heard innumerable stories of open overt corruption. After Monica Macovei became justice minister under Traian Basescu, we all understood that things became clean but in fact they did not.

There was a wonderful documentary in December by an outfit called Recorder, which broadcast judges openly talking about the occult influences that were brought to bear on them. 

This resulted in a remarkable public scandal where one very brave judge stood in front of the judges of the Court of Appeal who gathered together on TV to reassure the public on television that the judges were not corrupt and without preface accused them of widespread malpractice. 

The judges were heard by journalists talking audibly on their telephones, saying they'd received orders from the PSD adjacent head of the Court of Cassation (the Supreme Court). Like baddies in cowboy films they started to argue among themselves and became laughing stocks. 

Nothing will be done about it. 

In England judges can be impeached although no judge has been impeached, I think, since 1680. 

Judicial corruption in England isn't prevented by the threat of impeachment, but a sense of honour amongst the elite to which judges belong, even now despite the egalitarian social changes brought about by Tony Blair. 

The pre-Communist Romanian elite was pretty unsatisfactory. But something nobody says is that the worst thing that communism did was to destroy the elites and any sense of noblesse oblige.