National Integrity Agency: GRECO recommends clearer legal framework on integrity

The GRECO report (Group of States against Corruption) recommends carrying out an analytical study of the legal integrity framework and revising it to 'increase clarity, coherence and completeness,' according to the National Integrity Agency (ANI).

On Monday, the compliance report for GRECO's 5th evaluation round was made public, and the two recommendations concerning the mandate of the National Integrity Agency were assessed as 'partially implemented.'

According to an ANI release, the first recommendation concerns carrying out an analytical study of the legal integrity framework and revising it to 'increase clarity, coherence and completeness.'

In evaluating this recommendation, Council of Europe experts noted that ANI had published a comprehensive study and that 'efforts were made to formulate concrete proposals' in this regard. Moreover, the experts observed that the recommendation will be considered partially implemented until legislative proposals are drafted.

The second recommendation relates to the regular, effective and substantive verification of asset and interest declarations of individuals in executive leadership positions. In this context, ANI has presented a new big-data IT platform designed to automatically identify potential integrity incidents, which has already started producing tangible results. GRECO noted that the platform 'appears capable of generating alerts regarding integrity incidents related to all asset and interest declarations.'

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Furthermore, given the recent launch of the platform, GRECO emphasises that 'the improvement of its performance and overall effectiveness should be evaluated in the next compliance report before concluding that the first part of the recommendation has been fully implemented.'

The GRECO recommendations come in the context of the Constitutional Court's decision of 29 May, which prohibited the publication of asset and interest declarations on the National Integrity Agency's website and on the online pages of other public institutions. The Court also ruled that declarations no longer need to include the income and assets of spouses and children.

GRECO notes that Romania has implemented or satisfactorily addressed only two of the 26 recommendations formulated in the 5th evaluation round report regarding the prevention of corruption and the promotion of integrity at the central level (executive leadership positions) and within law enforcement institutions. Of the remaining 24 recommendations, 22 have been partially implemented, while two have not been implemented.