The Independent Evaluation Commission for assessing the integrity of candidates for positions in the self-administration bodies of judges and prosecutors (“the Pre-Vetting Commission”) has issued a public response to the report “Pre-Vetting Phases: the Unseen Face of Justice Reform”, published by Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) in February 2025 on the FES-Moldova website.
In a letter addressed to FES, the Commission expressed its “deep concern about the content of this report in light of multiple shortcomings in the report, including seriously flawed methodology.” According to the Commission, the report relies primarily on the views of candidates who failed the evaluation process and “never gave the Pre-Vetting Commission an opportunity to provide clarifications or answer questions”, which contradicts international monitoring standards, such as those applied by OSCE/ODIHR.
The Commission also pointed out the report’s failure to address Supreme Court of Justice (SCJ) decisions upholding the Commission’s evaluations, and its lack of attention to resumed evaluation decisions, which followed the SCJ’s rulings. As of 31 January 2025, “the Pre-Vetting Commission had issued 21 resumed evaluation decisions, 18 of which were appealed to the SCJ. The SCJ had upheld 12 resumed evaluation decisions out of the 18 that were appealed and ordered one re-evaluation.
The report further alleged the improper use of information obtained from the National Anticorruption Center (NAC) and the Security and Intelligence Service (SIS). The Commission firmly rejected these claims, stating that “all of these requests were lawful, proportionate and fully consistent with the evaluation criteria and the Commission’s mandate under Law No. 26/2022,” and emphasized that “the Pre-Vetting Commission never failed a candidate based exclusively on information from SIS or NAC.”
The Commission also criticized the report’s misapplication of the presumption of innocence, clarifying that this principle applies strictly to criminal proceedings and “does not apply” to the pre-vetting process. The report’s repeated references to this principle “reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature and scope of constitutional guarantees.”
Additionally, the Commission raised concerns over a potential conflict of interest, noting that the report’s lead author, presented as an independent expert, is “a practicing lawyer in the Republic of Moldova who has represented one of the SCJ judges, Mariana Ursachi (Pitic),” who herself failed the vetting process and was part of the SCJ panel that annulled several Commission decisions in 2023.
The Pre-Vetting Commission acknowledges the value of professional and unbiased monitoring and reporting on its work. And the Commission regrets “that the authors of the FES report did not use a robust and credible methodology to provide readers a useful report on the pre-vetting process in the Republic of Moldova. Instead, the FES report chose to completely ignore the SCJ decisions on resumed evaluations and SCJ decisions on initial evaluations that upheld the Pre-Vetting Commission’s decisions, relied primarily on opinions of candidates that failed the evaluation and anecdotal reports without determining their merit or reliability, as well as news articles and broadcasts,” the Commission stated in conclusion.
The Commission called on FES to publish its full response “in order to permit readers to fairly assess the FES report’s observations and conclusions”. FES has agreed to do so.
