Standarde de integritate publică în administrația publică locală. Stabilitatea legislativă a cadrului de integritate publică

Abstract

The paper aims to analyze the impact of the most important legislative amendments to local elected public integrity framework, adopted by the Parliament in recent years. European Commission Cooperation and Verification Mechanism (CVM) Reports on Romania (2007-2017), as well as EU Anticorruption Report (2014) emphasize the need for consolidation and for a raised sustainability of public integrity legal framework in order to increase the efficiency of prevention and to curb incompatibilities and conflicts of interests in public sector. One of the main priorities of the newly adopted National Anticorruption Strategy (2016-2020) is assuring the stability of legislative and institutional framework in fighting corruption processes and procedures. Recent CVM Reports on Romania (2016, 2017) state that Romania has comprehensive public integrity legislation and an independent institution (National Integrity Agency – NIA) to assure the implementation of legal sanctions and specific regulations. In the same time, legislative amendments aiming only to restrain the legal competencies of NIA and reduce dissuasiveness of some legal sanctions have been adopted by the Romanian Parliament; others, with similar object, are pending in the legislative processes within the Parliament. The paper analyses the most important such legislative amendments brought to the integrity framework, highlighting the negative consequences regarding guarantees of protection of local elected mandates from potential conflicts of interests. The study aims to identify possible solutions for granting stability to the legislative framework and raising public integrity standards in local public administration.

Keywords

• public integrity standards, cooperation and verification mechanism report, local public administration, anticorruption strategy