The Pardons Bill: Debates and Sanctions

Growing scepticism about the pardons bill being a solution to prison overcrowding in Romania

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Bogdan Matei, 11.05.2017, 13:10

Ever since the start of the year, the pardons bill issue has dominated public debate in Bucharest more than Romanias favourite pastimes, namely football and the private life of public figures, ever did. Back in winter, the new power, made up of the Social Democratic Party and the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats, said that they would solve the problem of prison overcrowding by granting collective pardons through an emergency decree. Ever since, this has seriously irritated civil society and has brought hundreds of thousands of people into the street. The large scale protests, accompanied by harsh criticism from the rightist opposition, the media and Romanias foreign partners, have forced the Government to scrap the decree and have prompted its initiator, the infamous Justice Minister Florin Iordache, to resign.

Given that the issue of prison overcrowding remains unsolved, and the European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly fined Romania over the poor detention standards, the collective pardons idea was left for Parliament to deal with. Fiery but nevertheless unproductive, the debates on the law drafted by the Government have yielded no results yet.

They did however make another victim, in the person of the Social Democrat Serban Nicolae, the head of the Senates legal committee. His determination to include corruption offences among the crimes covered by pardoning has affected the already damaged image of his party, and this has visibly irritated the Social Democrats leader Liviu Dragnea. Consequently, the latter ordered Nicolaes removal from the helm of the Senates legal committee and of the Social Democratic floor group.

In turn, Serban Nicolae says that the bill, in the form adopted by the Senates legal committee, is completely ineffective, as it fails to solve the problem of overcrowded penitentiaries and does not meet any needs of society or any of the obligations that Romania has before the European Court of Human Rights. According to Nicolae, only 1,032 people will benefit the provisions in the bill.

The former head of state Traian Basescu, currently a Peoples Movement Party MP, seems to have taken over Nicolaes rhetoric when he said on Wednesday that the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and its leader Liviu Dragnea no longer want to deal with the pardons bill issue, which allows him to further support it from an independent position. Romania, Basescu says, needs to grant extensive pardoning, and this bill will result in the release of only 433 people and in reduced sentences for another 589. Basescu promises to do everything he can to free physicians, professors, and other categories of employees with higher education, who ended up in prison for corruption deeds such as bribe taking.

Thus, commentators say, after having claimed that the fight against corruption was the fundamental dimension of his presidency, Basescu ruins his political heritage, making his supporters regret that they have ever voted him.

(translated by: Elena Enache)