Analyses

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09 Mar: recap - the draft laws that may affect the activity of NGOs

Facem o scurtă recapitulare a celor două inițiative legislative care amenință activitatea organizațiilor non-guvernamentale: PLx 317/2022 care, printre altele, restrânge termenul în care asociațiile pot ataca în instanță autorizații de construire și documente de planificare urbană L857/2022 care, printre altele, introduce răspunderea patrimonială a membrilor consiliului director al unei asociații pentru orice prejudiciu cauzat terților, dacă o acțiune în instanță a fost respinsă prin hotărâre judecătorească definitivă, Detaliem, în documentul de mai jos, în engleză, care este statusul acestor inițiative în circuitul legislativ și explicăm, punctual, problemele pe care le ridică pentru activitatea ONG-urilor.

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07 Feb: Budget & Legislative Analysis: The National Recovery and Resilience Plan

This document presents an analysis from both a budgetary and a legislative point of view of the implementation of the PNRR. Thus, this year we decided that the traditional analysis of parliamentary activity (Session 1, Session 2 and Session 3) should be based on the monitoring of the legislative reforms from the Recovery and Resilience Plan, following the legislative process for the milestones that had to be met in 2021 and 2022. If you are not familiar with the work of the Parliament, you can read more about how it works and what the parliamentary legislative process is here.

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26 Oct: Romania under the CVM - are we there yet?

Haste spoils the job. The Laws of Justice, the package of the three laws on the judicial system, had an accelerated legislative process under the justification of the lifting of the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism. The same argument was also used in 2009 and the consequences can be seen even now, an example being the recent decision of the ÎCCJ regarding the interpretation of CCR decisions related to prescription. The MCV has been hovering over us since the 2007 accession to the EU and the Government is committed to complying with its recommendations, as well as those of GRECO and the Venice Commission. However, the Justice laws passed through the Parliament without the opinion of the Venice Commission and the ruling coalition recognized that the legislative package, in the form adopted, is a "compromise". After, last weeks, we also attended the discussions...

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14 Sep: Romania: Budget Credibility and Sustainable Development Goals

  The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted by all members of the United Nations since 2015, were conceived as a map to a prosperous future, both for people and the planet. Among them are great goals such as eradicating poverty and hunger, making green energy accessible or gender equality; but in order to be able to achieve these goals, everything begins, as we are used to, with the allocation of a budget. Until we reach the investments and the de facto spending of the money allocated to achieve the intermediate objectives, the budgetary credibility is a challenge that we have to overcome. We can define budget credibility as a difference between what we set out to do in the budget at the beginning of the year, and what we actually did by the end of the year, the bigger the difference, the credibility...

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01 Sep: Analysis: keeping an eye on Parliament, February – June 2022

Starting with the first parliamentary session last year, we launched this assessment of legislative activity that we called, simply, "Eyes on Parliament." As part of this project, we have so far released two other analyses, for the February-June 2021 session, respectively for the September-December 2021 session, and of course, the one you are reading now for the first session of 2022 – February-June. We have collected and analyzed the data on the activity of the parliamentarians so far and we present to you what the 466 parliamentarians managed to do, how the poles of power and the functions in the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate changed with a new political majority and how the elected officials succeeded to legislate extremely quickly on some subjects and still miss some already old promises. The previous parliamentary session was...

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13 Jul: Rule of law report 2022: independence of the judiciary and the press, plus real public consultation

The European Commission has just published its annual report on the state of the rule of law. The recommendations for Romania are things that we have been insisting on throughout the last year. Let's hope that the governors will be more open to listen to the recommendations if they come from the Commission. Here they are: let's make sure that the justice laws (yes, those broken by Dragnea & co in 2018) provide guarantees for the independence of the judiciary. Keywords: disciplinary measures against magistrates, special section, European standards, opinions of the Venice Commission. to regulate lobbying for parliamentarians. to solve the DNA's operational challenges, including the recruitment of prosecutors + closely monitoring the impact of the new system for investigating magistrates' corruption. strengthening the rules so as to ensure the independence of the public media, according to European standards. to ensure "real" public consultation before we…

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31 May: Analysis: transparency of municipal budgets - 2022

The year 2022 was a year of settlement for public budgets – at least from the perspective of their approval calendar, most of the municipalities made efforts to have new budgets from the first two months of the year. However, despite the fact that the municipal budgets were approved a little earlier than 2021, we are still far from the normal and legal calendar that imposes new budgets for a new fiscal year. This year the delay was "only" two months at best. As before, the current analysis looked at the process of drawing up and approving local budgets in 109 municipalities in Romania (including the six sectors of the Capital), looking at the extent to which they comply with the criteria of the legislation on local public finances related to...

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31 May: Romania declines in transparency and budgetary oversight over previous years

Today, the results of the Open Budget Survey 2021 for Romania (#OpenBudgets) were published. It is a study that appears once every 2 years, carried out by the NGO International Budget Partnership. The results are accompanied by recommendations that Romania should follow for a more transparent state budget and close to the interest of us, the citizens. Funky Citizens is a research partner for Romania, joining over a hundred other NGOs and academic institutions around the world contributing to the study. This is an independent, comparative and evidence-based research tool that assesses how authorities spend public money by measuring three internationally accepted macro indicators: Transparency – to what extent the public has access to information related to the budget of…

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31 Jan: Analysis: keeping an eye on the Parliament

Pe măsură ce am pășit în 2022, legislatura 2020-2024 a terminat cea de-a doua sesiune parlamentară și a intrat în vacanța care se încheie la 1 februarie 2022. Așadar, e un bun moment pentru a doua evaluare a activității parlamentarilor noștri pentru a analiza cum au legiferat parlamentarii și de data aceasta. A fost o sesiune plină de evenimente, cu o moțiune de cenzură adoptată, schimbări ale polilor de putere și reorganizări ale structurilor parlamentare.  Aleșii au reușit din nou să rateze teme importante de legiferare cum ar fi desființarea Secției Speciale și a Pensiilor speciale sau Sistematizări legislative prin codificare (codurile penale, codul administrativ). Parlamentului nu prea îi place transparența, drept urmare toate datele au fost colectate manual de pe site-urile celor două camere. Ne asumăm că există posibilitatea…