Romanian magistrates “deserve” high salaries and pensions higher than their salaries and to retire at an early age.
You don’t have to have a law degree, nor do you even have to be self-taught in criminal matters. You don’t need to read every word and every line of every indictment drawn up by prosecutors and every legal motivation published by judges to understand how justice in Romania actually works.
As an ordinary person, caught between a full-time job, family and various other activities, in other words, leading a “banal” life, as an ordinary person, it is enough to follow the news and make a calculation: how many cases involving big names have been opened, how many actually reach the trial phase, how many centuries do the trials last, how many millions of various exceptions are introduced along the way. Who in politics and big business knows who among the ranks of magistrates, the bizarrely high fortunes some magistrates have, how many big name convicts flee abroad, how many years it takes for them to be brought back to Romania …
…. And then, how many escape before being sent to prison, how many get out long before the expiration of the sentence…
… Finally, it is also worth taking a look at how many of the cases involve the ‘miracle’ of prescription or the miracle of ‘erasing’ some of the charges.
Even this may seem like a difficult and time-consuming calculation, but whoever starts doing it will notice that it is not that difficult at all – the job is quite fast, because there are news stories and press investigations. You just have to browse the internet a bit.
Of course, each criminal case involving serious corruption has its particularities, and on top of that, the sophistry practiced by defense lawyers, as well as by some judges, can even whitewash the accused in a manner so effective that it makes him look like a saint… stunning everyone – from honest legal professionals, to independent experts, to journalists and ordinary citizens from various professions with various concerns.
No matter what magistrates say about opinions (including this editorial) that are critical of their work, the balance sheet of the Romanian justice, as the common man perceives it just by scrolling through news about corruption in Romania boils down to this simple truth: there is a lot of theft in Romania, many people steal, few are punished, their punishments are light, they are happy to get off lightly, while the taxpayer pays at least three times over.
- It pays through the damage caused to the public budget.
- It pays through the damage which is only partially recovered, late or even not at all.
- It pays through salaries for magistrates, which has no equivalent in the universe of the common man, through related benefits, without equivalent in the universe of the ordinary employee, through extremely early retirement which is offered to magistrates, through pensions many times higher than the average, for the professionals who deliver this unforgivable type of justice.
On the day when three heavyweights have escaped from prison or part of their sentence – some after they had defied justice, fled abroad, and all before having executed their entire period behind bars – it is healthy to keep in mind the big picture: the higher you are and the more you steal, the faster and cheaper the chances of escaping.
It’s a perfectly flawed pyramid of values, but the fact that the pyramid looks like this is the fault of those who share justice rather than those who have committed injustices.
And it is, once again, healthy to keep this picture in mind, given the fact that we are in the midst of a challenge by magistrates to the government reform on pensions and their retirement.
The heads of justice have been machine-gunning the public space for weeks with more and more heroic communities, with communiqués that sing, as in ancient epics, the superhuman virtues of people in robes, with communiqués that lament, as if on the deathbed, phantom attempts to annihilate the independence of justice.
Of course, it would be childish to limit our frustrations and memories to Tuesday, when the Costea-Vlădescu-Vâlcov trio enjoyed the dubious benefits for the VIP category of justice.
They are only the latest beneficiaries, from a long, long line of privileged people who, as the case may be, have served fewer years and/or have remained with a lot of money in their pockets.
It’s worth it – isn’t it? – to be on time with your tax payments, to pay higher taxes and to accept, that huge salaries and pensions are paid from your taxes for certain magistrates who disappoint us chronically, but who utter such lines as the head of the High Court, Lia Savonea, did less than a month ago: “Justice is not negotiated and does not submit to political pressures”.
Ah! How right this woman is, in theory, and yet how much injustice she serves, in practice!
