Network of Anti-Corruption Specialists

Romania’s constitutional court recently ruled that part of the provisions mandating the country’s National Integrity Agency (NIA) were unconstitutional. In the past two years, almost 1,000 top officials have been checked, with around 50 cases of wrongdoing proven in court. Around 100 members of parliament are currently under scrutiny. The European Commission had included the NIA’s activity among the benchmarks of the EU’s ‘co-operation and verification mechanism’, whose basic purpose was to keep pressure on Romania to continue rule-of-law reforms after accession. Speculations have it that the EU’s diminishing leverage has produced a climate in which the desire not to disclose certain details of public interest has taken the upper hand again. Read the whole story in a recent article in the European Voice.