Op-Ed: Moldova’s judicial vetting four years after: the reset has begun, consolidation must follow
Author: Petru Istrati, GEJ Member
Four years of external evaluation reset the top of the system. The next stake is no longer related to the filter, but to those who come after it, from the faculties of law and the NIJ to the empowerment of the self-administration bodies to take over the good practices of ensuring integrity, competence and efficiency in the justice system of the Republic of Moldova.
On 28 April 2026, IPRE organised a policy dialogue dedicated to the four years since the launch of the external evaluation of the integrity of judges and prosecutors. The debate was attended by parliamentarians, representatives of the Ministry of Justice and the Superior Council of Prosecutors, a member of the Commission for the Evaluation of Prosecutors and legal experts. The discussion was useful precisely because it did not follow the logic of “everything is going well” or “everything has failed”. The discussion addressed both the results achieved and the problems that remain.
An honest assessment can be reduced to a single idea: judicial vetting in the Republic of Moldova, perhaps not the most perfect instrument, takes longer than expected, but abandoning it now would be riskier than seeing it through. This is especially so when, after four years, a transitional justice measure at the heart of the reform effort is beginning to show its first results.
Vetting did not appear out of the blue. It had a clear motivation, namely to reset a system that could not reform itself. After a decade in which reforms from within either failed or were undermined, external evaluation became the only tool powerful enough to break the inertia. This is not an easy reform; it is a complex transitional justice measure, designed to ensure that all key positions in the justice sector are filled by honest, courageous judges and prosecutors free from outside pressure. The process was sequenced: first, the pre-vetting of candidates for the self-administration bodies under Law no. 26/2022, followed by the vetting of judges of the Supreme Court of Justice under Law no. 65/2023 and the vetting of judges of the courts of appeal and court presidents, judges of the specialised panels for corruption and corruption-related offences, prosecutors of the specialised prosecutor’s offices, the Prosecutor General, Deputy Prosecutors General, and prosecutors in key positions in the territorial prosecutor’s offices under Law no. 252/2023.
On this approach, an architecture of guarantees was built that kept the mechanism within predictable limits: consultation of the Venice Commission, which refined several of the authorities’ initial solutions; the presence of international experts on the commissions; the preservation of the final decision with the self-administration bodies of the judiciary and the prosecution service at the vetting stage; and judicial review of the pre-vetting commission’s reports and of the vetting bodies’ decisions. There were delays, challenges, internal resistance, legislative changes along the way and moments when the process appeared to stall. The mechanism, however, held firm and continued to function.
A four-year review
The official figures, detailed in the statistics of the evaluation commissions, allow for a data-driven look. At pre-vetting, of 138 candidates evaluated for the SCM, SCP and their specialised boards, only 59 passed — fewer than half. 72 did not pass, 6 withdrew from the competition, and one is still under evaluation. The very bodies meant to lead the reform were themselves heavily filtered, before the reform produced any other effects.
At vetting, of 166 subjects within scope (118 judges and the remainder prosecutors and candidates for the SCJ from other legal professions), 51 were confirmed, 29 did not pass, and 65, almost four in ten resigned or withdrew. As for prosecutors, of 130 subjects, 21 have been confirmed, 7 did not pass, and 102 are still in progress, including all 63 from PCCOCS (the Prosecutor’s Office for Combating Organised Crime and Special Cases). These figures show that vetting is not a formal procedure, but a filter with real effects. At least for those who preferred to resign rather than subject their integrity to close scrutiny, the mechanism produced an effect that a decade of domestic reforms had not.
Of the candidates for the SCJ (judges, prosecutors and members of other legal professions), 21 were confirmed and 25 either did not pass or withdrew. To these must be added 25 judges from the previous composition of the SCJ who resigned before the evaluation. These figures illustrate how deep the problem was before the external exercise began. More important than the number of subjects evaluated, however, is that the effects are starting to be felt in the administration of justice itself. At the SCJ, following the renewal of its composition, the court is estimated to have closed in 2025 almost twice as many cases as it received in the same period, clearing the backlog accumulated over years. The specialised panels for corruption cases at the Chişinău Court have increased their disposal rate by around 50%. And the first effective custodial sentences in high-level corruption cases have ceased to be the exception they were in previous years. The risk that vetting would paralyse the system, as occurred under the Albanian model, did not materialise. Interim measures, in particular the temporary transfer of judges between courts averted a complete deadlock, and much of the 2022–2024 slowdown has already been absorbed.
The Albanian experience also offers a recent lesson relevant to the quality of the process in the Republic of Moldova. In its judgment in Metalla v. Albania of 5 May 2026, the European Court of Human Rights found a violation of Article 8 of the Convention on account of the lack of proportionality between the sanction imposed on a judge and the evidence on which it was based. The legitimacy of vetting as such was not called into question, but the quality of the reasoning in the reports and the proportionality of the sanctions remain conditions that our evaluation commissions must bear in mind.
But what doesn’t work yet?
Speaking honestly about vetting means not avoiding the difficulties. There is a serious shortage of personnel, especially in the prosecution service, where many managerial positions are still held on an interim basis — even though, in 2026, the Prosecutor’s General Office and the specialised offices have appointed leaders who have passed vetting. The evaluation procedures are complex, deadlines have slipped beyond what was initially foreseen, and institutional stability has suffered from vacancies and prolonged interim arrangements. Public perception remains divided: the latest opinion poll conducted by IPRE shows a visible improvement, with around 49% of respondents considering that the justice sector has improved over the past three years, compared with 32% in 2023. But 49% is not, for now, a victory. None of these challenges invalidates the reform.
March 2026 amendment
A recent development, also discussed on 28 April, deserves careful but proportionate analysis. Under Law no. 26/2026, the voting threshold for the appointment of the international members of the evaluation commissions has been lowered to a simple majority where the first round of voting fails to secure the 3/5 qualified majority initially required. The amendment raises two types of concern, identified among others in the amicus curiae opinion submitted by IPRE to the Constitutional Court.
Procedurally, the amendment was inserted at the second reading, without a necessary connection to the subject matter of the original draft law, which aimed to strengthen the security of magistrates. The Constitutional Court’s settled case-law[1] establishes that the requirement of two readings under Article 74(1) of the Constitution has not only a procedural but also a substantive dimension: legislative solutions must be subject to genuine parliamentary debate, not slipped into a draft with a different subject matter. In substance, moving from a qualified to a simple majority weakens an element that the Venice Commission[2] has explicitly recommended: the qualified majority should be maintained in all rounds of voting, and any unblocking should be sought, where necessary, through mechanisms that involve the opposition or other institutions, not by lowering the threshold. Otherwise, the incentive for compromise disappears.
The parliamentary majority’s argument was one of pragmatism: unblocking the procedure in a context where consensus cannot always be obtained. The political argument is understandable. Broad political consensus, however, is not a technical detail. It is part of the credibility pillar of vetting, and weakening it costs more, in the long run, than it solves in the short term.
Capacity – the element that decides what comes next after the vetting filter
Vetting has begun to show signs of resetting the system. But the reset is a starting point, not an end point. The 65 resignations and withdrawals among judges, together with departures among prosecutors, leave vacancies that must be filled by professionals who are honest, well trained, and capable of carrying the change forward. It is here, in the coming years, that the durability of the filter’s effects will be decided.
The first vector is related to the self-administration bodies. The SCM and SCP emerged from pre-vetting with a qualitatively different legitimacy from that of their predecessors. They must now become institutions that internalise, as a matter of routine, the integrity-verification tools used in vetting: verifiable declarations of assets and interests, checks on relations with politically exposed persons, periodic lifestyle-versus-income assessments, and screening for possible vulnerabilities to undue influence. The good practices developed by the evaluation commissions must be embedded in the selection, evaluation and disciplinary boards of the SCM and SCP, so that integrity assessment ceases to be an extraordinary episode and becomes a permanent feature of the judges and prosecutors’ career.
The second vector is related to the National Institute of Justice. NIJ reform is one of the critical links in this period. The NIJ’s mission is to attract more strong candidates and provide them with training aligned with European practice. Integrity verification should become a practical requirement at two stages: on admission to the NIJ and at graduation, before the proposal for appointment. This is not a mini-vetting for beginners, but minimum, proportionate standards for verifying integrity and professional ethics, ensuring that the filter applied today at the top of the system will not be deactivated from the bottom up as the next generation enters the profession. The NIJ should also strengthen its continuing-education programmes on judicial ethics, integrity, European law and the EU acquis — work that is already under way.
The third vector is related to the law faculties of national universities. This is where, in the long term, those who will enter the legal profession are trained. In many universities the legal curricula remain out of step with the reality in which graduates will work: European law must be taught not only as a stand-alone compulsory subject but also transversally across the curriculum; the case-law of the CJEU and the ECtHR must be integrated more consistently; competition law and the sectoral acquis in the negotiated areas are almost absent; and practical skills such as case-file analysis, legal writing and applied professional ethics need far more attention. An update of the curriculum, aligned with EU standards and the acquis, is no longer an option but a precondition for Moldova to be able to operate professionally inside the European Union. Standards of academic integrity and ethics — including academic fraud, plagiarism and conflicts of interest — should be addressed as a distinct topic, not as a minor disciplinary matter. An upright magistrate begins as an upright student.
Conclusion
A review after four-years shows a reform that is still incomplete, but one that has begun to produce effects and that cannot be abandoned without losing much of the institutional investment already made. Stopping it halfway would mean writing off the four-year investment and returning the system to the situation from which the reform sought to extract it. Of all the options on the table today, that is the most expensive. Vetting is not a perfect tool — on the contrary, it is slow and demanding on the system. But none of these flaws is, in itself, an argument for stopping it. No justice reform works on laws and procedures alone. It needs people, those who have gone through the filter and those who come after them, and institutions to support them: an SCM and a SCP that build integrity-checking into routine practice, a NIJ that trains magistrates to EU standards, and law faculties that cultivate a culture of professional integrity.
Petru Istrati is a member of the Group of Experts on Justice (GEJ) within the Institute for European Policies and Reforms (IPRE).
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This op-ed is developed within the project “Ensuring the integrity, efficiency and independence of the justice system in Moldova – #Justice4Moldova”, funded by the European Union and co-financed by the Soros Foundation Moldova. The content of the material belongs to the author and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union and the Soros Foundation Moldova.
[1] HCC no. 14/2024, HCC no. 10/2025
[2] CDL-AD(2022)019; CDL-PI(2023)018
