In late February, in joint session in Parliament, MPs decided to include prosecutors during the communist regime on the list of people that fall under this law. As a result, 165 people who worked as magistrates before 1989 would have been removed from their prosecutorial positions for five years. Two professional magistrate associations, alongside Romania’s Prosecutor General, filed a motion in the High Court of Cassation and Justice, contesting a single article in the law, which they deemed unconstitutional. The High Court deferred the judgment to the Constitutional Court, which declared the entire law unconstitutional.

Under the initial form of the bill, all prosecutors fall under the incidence of lustration. Basically, the law was based on a presumption of guilt, supposing that all prosecutors had been guilty of human rights violations and acting outside the rule of law. The judges of the court criticized Parliament for not designing a new bill, after the initial law of lustration had been declared unconstitutional in its entirety in 2010. The Court’s opinion has not been published, but is predictable in its content, says Laura Stefan, an expert with the anti-corruption panel recently put together by the European Commission:

“The unconstitutionality of the law of lustration consists of the fact that all prosecutors who worked in this position before ’89 fall under lustration. The court said that you couldn’t declare automatically guilty an entire professional category, unless it has been proven, individual by individual, that all of them really were acting as part of the political police. Parliament did not vote on a bill identical in form with the bill that was ruled unconstitutional previously. Unfortunately, they introduced this provision which weakened the entire legislative framework of the law, and now we’re back to square one”.

In conclusion, the Law of Lustration will be sent back to Parliament for adjustment.