Romania PM Calls Continued Control Mechanism ‘Discriminatory’

Romania's interim Prime Minister on Tuesday accused the European Commission of being "discriminatory" after it said it would continue to impose a Cooperation and Verification Mechanism, CVM, on Romania but not on Bulgaria.

The Commission imposed the measure on both Balkan countries after their accession in 2007, to address their problems with corruption.

Viorica Dancila voiced her criticism late on Tuesday after the Commission announced that it would no longer apply the CVM to Bulgaria because it had shown sufficient progress in fighting corruption and organised crime.

"The CVM is only applied to Romania and Bulgaria, while other member states don't have this mechanism," complained Dancila, who said the mechanism should be scrapped unless it was applied to all 28 states.

Dancila's Social Democratic Party, PSD, government lost a no-confidence vote in parliament on 10 October but is still governing the country on an interim basis.

She called on the centre-right Romanian President, Klaus Iohannis, with whom her party has been in a constant feud,  to "seek equal treatment for all the states members".

Dancila also rejected the section of the CVM 2019 report that called the Romanian government's changes to the justice system "a source of great concern", and lambasted the so-called Special Unit for the Investigations of Crimes Committed by Magistrates.

The Romanian government set up the unit in 2018 to investigate prosecutors and magistrates suspected of corruption and of abuse of their powers. Its critics, including the European Commission, see it as a government tool to control the judiciary.

This and other reforms to the justice system were the brainchild of the former PSD leader Liviu Dragnea, who ruled...