The President of Romania Traian Basescu refused yesterday to promulgate the modification on the law settling the return of personal properties abusively confiscated under the Communist regime to the lawful owners, modifications initiated by the Romanian Conservatives headed by Dan Voiculescu. The President asked the Parliament to revise the project instead, arguing: "In political terms, the most severe fact is that, without stating it, the project would turn into a law on new confiscation of properties and consolidate the harm done under the Communist rule, when people were abusively deprived of their houses." The President explained it would be so because the project was implicitly aimed a annulling the status of owners belonging to those people whose properties had been confiscated right after the Communist regime had settled in, in 1945. He described such modifications as unconstitutional, since they would restrict the return of lands confiscated once with the private buildings now properties of state. He argues on: "This law is a way to get lawless income for those who bought properties when Law 112 was in force and the property documents were dismembered b court sentences. The law has it that they would be paid damaged by the state of Romania, in keeping with current prices. But such properties were sold to tenants for costs decided on the accounting price reference, on grounds of Law 12." He opined it would be a very unfavorable law to serve a clientele: "If you paid $ 15, 000 for the property you bought on grounds of Law 12, but the state pays you $ 300, 000 damages now, this is very unfair." (...) Broken rights Another argument of the President's refusal yesterday claims that such modifications would not abide by the European Human Rights Convention, particularly by those norms on the accessibility and predictability of juridical norms. The idea is that the project disregards the preeminence of law and of the separation of powers in a state, according to which the lawmaker is not to interfere in the use of administrative or judicial procedures by measures that would favor one side and harm the other or that would cause a change of judicial solutions after the procedure started and fetch other solutions, as stipulated in the new law. The President concluded that this project was actually a change of the law's initial contents, arguing that the version of the law he was to promulgate did not provide legislative solutions to transient situation. (...) "We asked for revision" Ingrid Zaarour, a president of the National Authority for Property Return, comments on the President's decision: "Right after the Parliament passed the modifications, we wrote a letter to the President, asking that the normative project should be sent back to the Parliament for revision. There are several reasons why we did it. First of all, the project to modify the law had some norms that were already included in the initial version and it also had some norms impossible to apply, in financial and social terms. Because of promulgated in this version, Law 10 has done by kindle more lawsuits for Romanian and international courts. We need solutions to the tenants issue too, solutions which this draft wouldn't have fetched."

Anca HRIBAN