Key political issues in the reform of Romanian judiciary under the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism

Unlike all other former socialist countries admitted as EU members before or after them, Romania and Bulgaria entered a particular supervision regime under the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism, which was supposed to help them to consolidate the rule of law and to actively impede corruption and organized crime. Years later, after the reforms it inspired engendered fierce political battles, the CVM came to an end. Should its policy instruments be abandoned or not after this sudden conclusion, it is increasingly obvious that their success or failure did not depend on technical decisions only, but also on multifaceted political intricacies of domestic partisanship and power struggles. Through the means of the political analysis, using a context-driven interpretative approach, this article underlines several crucial politically contested issues that have risen over the years and should be taken into consideration in any judicious assessment concerning the reform of the Romanian judiciary. Drawing from the observation of institutional change and public narratives, it distinguishes three persistent tensions: the uneasy relationship between judicial independence and autonomy, the problematic overemphasis of the role of public prosecutor's offices as agents of reform within a liberal-democratic normative framework and the prominence of mediatized contention at the expense of administrative problem-solving.