In last Sunday's speech, delivered in the Day of Justice, the President of Romania Traian Basescu told magistrates that they could have made Romanians a nice gift, had the EU monitoring of Romania ceased. But the fact is that it will go on. The head of state commented that the "good guys and bad guys" story was interesting. It was his answer to the speech given by Nicolae Popa, a president of the High Court of Justice in Romania. He argued it was harmful to talk about judges in terms of "good and bad guys", a way used as a description of the way cases were approached. And the President replied: "On my opinion, there are good guys and bad guys everywhere, whether we talk about Justice, where there work exceptional people, just like there are good and bad boys and girls." The head of state opined that such a celebration day was a good opportunity to remind about something important at stake these days: "This is about national interests. It would have been important, had we managed to put an end to the monitoring of Romania. You could have made us, the 22 million Romanians, a gift: no more monitoring." And he added that the outcome was the continuation of EU monitoring. President Basescu argued as follows: "We promised to fix the deficiencies in Justice in one year and a half. The Romanian government agreed with the Brussels representatives on it. Our meeting today is being dominated by the failure of Justice, which will be confirmed over a fortnight. Justice doesn't belong to you, it belongs to the Romanians who have to put up with more humiliating monitoring. The utopian idea of the separation of powers, of no collaboration, can lead to such a thing. None of you will like the future report. This is why, dear prosecutors and judges, the power to judge belongs to the state. And I am addressing you as head of state, demanding you for a partnership to prevent what can happen after the monitoring: the activation of the safeguard clause, which would take Justice out of Europe". And then the President just left the room.

Bogdan GALCA