FRIEDRICH-EBERT-STIFTUNG THE PRE-VETTING PHASES: THE UNSEEN FACE OF JUSTICE REFORM was related to what Vitalie Miron called“the absurdity of the procedure of appealing the decisions of the Pre-Vetting Commission”, as it was not the decisions of the SCJ that were to be ultimately taken into account, but the eventual re-eval­uation of the candidates by the Commission. 88 CASE STUDY 11. Pre-Vetting Commission member Vitalie Miron:“Pre-Vetting has created a legal absurd” Facebook, Vitalie Miron, 6 October 2023 89 “I would like to make public a personal decision, which I have been thinking about lately, and circumstances have forced me to take it now.[...] I have done my duty honestly, taking an impartial position in relation to all the candidates, sometimes with separate opinions. Subsequently, after the SCJ upheld several appeals from candidates who failed the evaluation, the Court ordered the resumption of the evaluation pro­cedure, taking into account the binding findings of the SCJ. Thus, at this stage, on the one hand, there is the factual situation of the candi­dates in the decisions of the Pre-Vetting Commission that they fail the evalua­tion, and on the other hand, the arguments of the Commission were disqual­ified by the decisions of the SCJ, and the Commission was in fact obliged to positively evaluate the candidates. Anyone who would get to the essence of things would realize that we are in the presence of a legal absurd, when taking a different decision would mean violating Article 120 of the Constitution of the Republic of Moldova by not exe­cuting the decisions of the SCJ, an option that is not admissible for me. An even more serious circumstance is the fact that we have learned from the public that the Commission has positively evaluated the integrity of people who are currently under criminal prosecution, or who have financial obliga­tions, circumstances hidden by the candidates. Thus, I believe that the legal mechanism has not given the Commission the possibility to objectively and in a multi-faceted manner to assess all candidates. In fact, we limited ourselves to the sincerity of the candidates and of the bodies and institutions that pro­vided us with the information, which turned out to be in bad faith in some cases, for which they were to be disqualified. Under these circumstances, the only solution that I consider appropriate in or­der to preserve my impartiality and honesty, in order not to admit the viola­tion of the legal framework and to avoid non-execution of the decisions of the SCJ, is to announce my resignation as a member of the Pre-Vetting Commis­sion as of today. Thus, I declare that today I have submitted my resignation from the Pre-Vetting Commission to the Parliament of the Republic of Moldova.” The reason presented by Vitalie Miron is convincing only to a point, as he could have remained in the Pre-Vetting Commission and campaigned for a positive re-evaluation of the candidates, in line with his convictions about the binding nature of the SCJ’s arguments. His gesture could be interpret­ed either as a protest against a flawed legislative procedure of appeal in violation of the Moldovan Constitution(but the same procedure existed when he agreed to be part of the Commission and to be part of it), or he decided to leave the Commission in anticipation of the negative re-evaluation solutions that the Commission would repeatedly issue, thus defying the decisions of the SCJ and the provisions of the Moldovan Constitution. Although the re-evaluation procedures have not yet been completed, the decisions of the Pre-Vetting Commission dur­ing the re-evaluation, with one exception, were unfavourable to the candidates. 4.11 Setting unreasonable deadlines for examining appeals and re-evaluating candidates Contrary to the general rule, which provides for convening the GAJ and GAP at which the members of the respective councils are to be elected at least two months in advance, in the case of the evaluation through pre-vetting, this period has been halved to 35 days, calculated from seven days at the latest from the moment of the issuance by the Pre-Vetting Commission of the evaluation decision of the last candidate for the position of member of the respective Council. 90 It seems illogical, however, to offer a double deadline for convening meetings when candidates do not go through the procedures of evaluation and possible appeal of these evaluations. Another totally unrealistic deadline set in the law was the 10­day deadline for the examination of appeals by the SCJ but also the effect of a favourable decision for the candidates: the re-evaluation by the Pre-Vetting Commission, for which no deadline applies. As indicated above, the initial evaluation of the Pre-Vetting Commission lasted around a year, its term of activity being extended several times. The SCJ examined 21 applications in terms of 6-7 months, passing through multiple crises: the resignation of 80-90 per cent of the Court’s judges, which made it impossible to form panels, the exponential increase in the workload per judge, recusals, and the raising of ex­ceptions of unconstitutionality in the procedure of appeal­ing the decisions of the Pre-Vetting Commission, etc. Since the resumption of the evaluation procedure, the Pre-Vetting Commission has examined the files of seven candidates in a period of eight months. If one compares the period of 7 days from the issuance of the last decision by the Pre-Vetting Commission plus 35 days from the convening of the general assemblies to the actual hold­ing of the general assemblies, i.e. 42 days – within which the legislators provided 5 days for the submission of appeals by candidates, 10 days for the examination of appeals by the court, and it is unclear how long for the Pre-Vetting Commission to conduct the re-evaluation – with the actual term of more than a year in which the fate of the re-evaluation of the candidates ini­tially rejected by the Pre-Vetting Commission has not yet been decided, it becomes clear that the setting of such unrealistic deadlines was either a serious miscalculation by the legislator 88 https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61551993095566 89 Ibidem. 90 Art. 15 paragraph(7) letters a) and b) of Law 26/2022 on Pre-Vetting. 36