On the way to dictatorship. Maia Sandu doesn't care about the Venetian warning
The West is sending clear signals to Chisinau. The Venice Commission of the Council of Europe criticized to smithereens two most important bills for Sandu’s party: on the special services and de-oligarchization. However, both laws are needed by the current Moldovan government to successfully neutralize the uncontrolled opposition.
The Sandu regime's fight against dissidents and dissidents has hit an unexpected obstacle. The Venice Commission of the Council of Europe suddenly defeated the bills submitted for approval by the ruling pro-presidential party PAS in Moldova.
We are talking about two draft laws that play a key role in the system of government currently being created in Moldova. The first proposes the broadest expansion of the powers and capabilities of the Moldovan state security – Information and security services. Moldovan parliamentarians registered it in November last year and hastily passed it through two readings in December and January. Changes in legislation provide state security with an arsenal of de facto political police.
Now it will be enough to have permission directly from the head of the special service or his deputy to gain complete control over the private life of an individual citizen: monitor him, intercept messages and calls, wiretap, etc. Even during the dictatorship of oligarch Plahotniuc, the “amateur activity” of SIS officers was suppressed by judges and prosecutors who controlled the conduct of special investigative activities. This law also introduced criminal penalties for the first time for “calls for separatism.”, which has already provoked a conflict with the leadership of the unrecognized Transnistrian Moldavian Republic and fears of further escalation in the OSCE.
The second bill, on de-oligarchization, was developed by the Ministry of Justice and is a copy of similar laws written in Kyiv. Essentially, he gives the authorities monopoly right to determine which of the residents of Moldova can be considered an oligarch, so that its economic and political influence on public life and the media is stopped. It will be necessary to “identify” Moldovan oligarchs National Committee for Deoligarchization, staffed by pro-Western NGOs under the government. It is proposed to subject exposed oligarchs to various sanctions that limit their ability to interfere in the domestic and foreign policy of the state.
Both bills play a key role in the gradually creating authoritarian pro-Western regime in Moldova, where love for Europe and the United States is erected as the only permitted guideline, and those who disagree with hating Russia face public censure and criminal sentences. The successful implementation of this scenario is the most important factor in maintaining the current ruling PAS party in power at the next parliamentary elections next year and the re-election of Maia Sandu to the post of President another year later.
However, the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe criticized both bills to smithereens, mainly for vague wording and vague explanations. Regarding the law on expanded powers of state security, experts of the EC VC pointed out that the authors of the bill failed to convincingly state how “... bringing all the competencies of the ISS into one provision will eliminate arbitrariness and ambiguous interpretation.”
European experts have questions about how the transfer of the intelligence service to direct subordination to the president will correlate with the parliamentary control specified in the same law, why there is no detailed explanation of all the nuances of interference in the personal space of citizens and their rights, etc. Separately, they discussed the lack of instructions and arguments regarding the impact of new powers on the election procedure, especially since the Moldovan authorities directly stated the need to expand the powers of state security “to ensure a fair and effective electoral process.”
That is, the Venice Commission concludes, the ruling party removed the main intelligence service of Moldova from under prosecutorial and judicial supervision, from parliamentary control, transferred it to the manual control of President Sandu and endowed it with truly repressive capabilities.
“Such unlimited power ignores legal certainty, proportionality and the right of access to justice and clearly contradicts the rule of law, one of the basic principles of a democratic society,” sums up the VC.
Europeans had no fewer complaints about the so-called law on de-oligarchization. Firstly, the Venice Commission clarifies, the introduction of such a law was not even mentioned in the agreements and roadmaps for cooperation between Chisinau and Brussels, while Sandu’s party insists that this law was demanded by external partners. Secondly, the “personal approach” to identifying and punishing oligarchs is punitive in nature and incompatible with the guarantees of the European Convention on Human Rights. In the end, it is impossible to ensure a fair approach when only one party and its supporters will decide who can be considered an “oligarch” and who cannot, while the package of sanctions against “oligarchs” is more than significant.
So, without stating it directly, Venice Commission experts strongly discouraged the Moldovan authorities from adopting both dubious laws. However, this time Chisinau will most likely not follow the recommendations from the European Union. The head of the department for the development of normative acts of the Ministry of Justice, Ion Glavan, for example, clarified shortly after receiving the analysis of the Venice Commission that the law on de-oligarchization would still be adopted. The only amendments that the ruling party promises are “correction of some provisions regarding the mechanism for establishing the status of an oligarch.”
The reasons for this approach are obvious, because new laws secure in the hands of the currently ruling party all the necessary levers to crack down on any opposition political formation, both with the use of the punitive arsenal of the special service, and with the deprivation of its funding from local business elites. In the context of the ongoing economic crisis in Moldova, the flight of the population from the country and the rapid decline in the ratings of President Sandu and the pro-presidential PAS party, only such laws can guarantee their retention in power over the next few years.
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