what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Wednesday, July 5, 2023

How Fares Democracy in Europe?

Today’s post remains on eastern europe but widens to embrace such countries as Bulgaria, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine and to cover such subjects as media freedom, rule of law, anticorruption work and judicial integrity. It's been sparked by two downloads

of regime of conditionality” which is a new one for me
which I haven’t had a chance to read yet
2004 had seen 10 countries admitted to the EU - just 2 countries were judged not sufficiently 
ready – Bulgaria and Romania on grounds of their levels of corruption and judicial incapacity. 
Both were admitted on 1st January 2007 but subjected to an annual inspection through a 
new procedure called the Cooperation and Verification mechanism (CVM). 
Coincidentally, these are the 2 countries in which I have lived since 2007 – indeed I had no 
sooner returned to Romania from an 8 year stint in Central Asia than I took up a position as 
Team Leader in Sofia in a project for training regional and local officials to ensure the country’s 
compliance with EU legislation. Exclusion from Schengen and the Euro gave Bulgaria and Romania 
reason for feeling the smack of second-class citizenship – particularly because after more 
than a decade they have not managed to satisfy the taskmasters in Brussels on judicial reform. 
The requirement for annual reports on judicial aspects and corruption continued until 2019 
when it was replaced by the Rule of Law Mechanism (RLM) which necessitates an annual report 
to be submitted to the Commission by each and every member country.
Bulgaria and Romania had by then become the least of the EU’s concerns - Hungary and Poland 
had quickly instituted significant departures from the rule of law – packing courts with political 
appointees, severely limiting media freedom and making political use of European Funds. 
And some older member countries such as France and Spain were considered to have questionable 
aspects to their judicial and constitutional systems

Much of this had passed me by – but a critical report commissioned by an Irish MEP Clare Daley 
on the 2021 assessment by the European Commission which started a dialogue with member 
countries about their submissions. Her report – called Binding the Guardians – was written 
by a well-known political economist Albena Azmanova who basically analyses how well the European 
Commission is fulfilling the task of holding member countries to account for their observation 
of the Rule of Law. It starts by suggesting four tests for the Commission’s work -

We suggest that, in order to effectively comply with the rule of law while conducting its annual rule
 of law surveys, the Commission needs to be guided by (at least) four norms:
  • clarity of communication,
  • thoroughness in addressing rule of law violations (that is, in the full range and depth of detail),
  • equal treatment of the subjects of power, and
  • impartiality in the use of power (in the sense of not having a narrow partisan-political agenda).
Obscurity is a fertile ground for arbitrariness, omissions tacitly condone what is omitted, 
favoritism disempowers some, and partisan-political considerations harm the common good.

Azmanova then applies these tests to the Commission commentary and finds the 
following problems
  • A dangerous conflation of “rule of Law” with aspects of procedural democracy
  • Vague, overly-diplomatic language
  • Restricted focus - The Commission report delimits its range to four areas: the 
justice system, the anti-corruption framework, media freedom, and ‘other institutional 
checks and balances’.
  • Failing to include the operations of the private sector
A skim of the 2023 Report has unearthed a lot of other reports from worthy bodies 
such as the Council of Europe, Transparency International, Judicial bodies and European 
Parliamentary Committees.. Just think of the tens of thousands of people involved  in this work!!

Other Relevant Material
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2021/11/bulgaria-flies-under-radar.html 
https://edoc.coe.int/en/annual-activity-report/11589-state-of-democracy-human-right-and-the-rule-of-law-2023-annual-report-of-the-secretary-general-of-the-council-of-europe.html 
https://rm.coe.int/report-of-the-high-level-reflection-group-of-the-council-of-europe-/1680a85cf1 2022
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/committees/en/libe-democracy-rule-of-law-and-fundament/product-details/20190103CDT02662 
https://commission.europa.eu/system/files/2023-06/scoreboard-factsheet--v2.pdf 
https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2022 
https://verfassungsblog.de/impunity/
UPDATE
A report from October 2024 questions the veracity of reporting
https://dq4n3btxmr8c9.cloudfront.net/files/_adyxi/Gap_Analysis_EC_Rule_of_Law_
Report_By_Liberties.pdf

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