Although Romania's political life after 1989 has gone through three different political orientations, there has always been in power the most powerful political, but transparty group: the corrupted party. Unlike in consolidated democracies, where the protection for consumers and citizens' interests prevails, what dominates in our country is the protection for the corrupted and for the oligarchs' interests. At the time when civic groups and electoral political alliances such as the Civic Alliance and the Democratic Convention were announcing their moral programs against corruption, we imagined that the only condition for an efficient fight against corruption was to sack Ion Iliescu and his group. His group with a changing name, currently the PSD (Social-Democrat Party), was sacked twice, but the countering of corruption isn't over yet. Moreover, it looks like it never started, although there have passed four years since Traian Basescu announced pales would be planted for empaling people in the Victoria Square, Bucharest. The new Vlad the Empaler of Romanian politics is quite late. Why isn't the fight against corruption effecting in anything and anybody? Why are the big corrupted thriving, no matter who is in power? There are many reasons for this: visible, invisible and less visible ones. There are reasons easy to understand or hard to explain. If I start analyzing it and thinking about writing a book, I will start documenting and collecting the proves in a research labyrinth I could only escape a few years later. So this I just a brief analysis While attending Lawyers' Congress in Costinesti, President Basescu told the Romanian lawyers that they could ask for better pay only if they would be more efficient. So the ex mayor of Bucharest was off topic once more time. Lawyers are the only efficient experts in the Romanian judicial system or, more exactly, they are the most efficient. Take the case of Sile Pietroi, a mafia man recently released by judges, after policemen, prosecutors and even the secret services took pains in tracing an arresting him. Another famous example: PM lawyer Sergiu Andon addressed the Constitutional Court against Law 187/ 1999 in relation to the unmasking of the ex Communist Secret Service in Romania as political police, the grounds of the CNSAS (National Council for Research on the Communist Secret Service Archive). The constitutional Court decided that Dan Voiculescu's lawyer was right and the initial CNSAS was dismembered. And there are a lot more cases of the kind, such as business and political celebrities never reaching court, although al sorts of prosecutors work against them for years. The lawyers and clients of such celebrities are eager to get to court, for they are sure they will get favorable decisions. I have mentioned these cases, not all of them corruption cases, to highlight an important tendency: although people talk about how frail our democracy is, the system to protect the universal rights of man and individual freedom works perfectly when the lawyer machine is set going and the individual (not any, the wealthy one in particular) is protected. The corrupted too is in the category of individual protected by democracy, who benefit of the presumption of innocence. And it is around the corrupted that hoards of good lawyers swarm. But the system making laws and authorities is extremely weak. Although we complain about the centralism and omnipotence of the state, in our post-communist democracy the authority of the state is fiction. Unlike in economy, where the state is supposed to be minimal, as far as the rule of the law is concerned it must be maximal. Here I go, but my column is already over. I will be back with new paradoxes about the protection of the corrupted in democracy.

Dan PAVEL