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President Klaus Iohannis said on Wednesday that he had spoken with European Commission Vice-President for Values and Transparency Vera Jourova about lifting the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism (CVM) and pointed out that it is possible for it to be lifted by the end of the year, if the laws of justice are corrected and the Criminal Codes are streamlined.
"We want to have an independent, functional judiciary that needs improved laws, we want to have clearer, more transparent procedures. If that happens, it is possible for the CVM to be lifted by the end of the year and to move to the rule of law verification mechanism that has been established for all the states of the Union," Iohannis said on the sidelines of his participation in the NATO Summit in Madrid.
He said that Romania had made variable progress in lifting the CVM, adding that there was a "sad memory stage," but also that our country had lost a year in the first coalition after the parliamentary elections.
"In our country, the progress was variable. We had periods when we progressed well and we all thought that there was still little time before the CVM would be lifted. Then we had a stage of sad memory, in which it seemed to us that the CVM will never be lifted because Parliament at that time passed a set of laws that took us to the past and not to the future, after which things started to go in a better direction again after the last parliamentary elections. The first year after the parliamentary elections, in the first coalition, was wasted time because things were not done in practice. Now all have been resumed and there is the possibility to solve this matter if the laws of justice are corrected, repaired, as I have promised since they were broken, since 2018 onwards, if the Codes are finalized, if the whole procedure we have assumed to do so is done. It is a very tight schedule that would be discussed if we do everything that can be done and what we want to do. It's a significant difference - we don't do these things because someone comes and forces us but because we want to do them," Iohannis said.
AGERPRES
