Brussels, 13/09/2012 (Agence Europe) - On Wednesday 13 September in Strasbourg during a discussion on political developments in Romania, the European commissioner for justice and fundamental rights, Viviane Reding, proposed that each member state be evaluated on its European values through a mechanism that would test the different legal systems in the EU27.
The commissioner also announced that her services would work towards developing a European “scoreboard” on judicial systems, based on criteria that would assess the, “strength, effectiveness and reliability” of legal systems in the EU27. She also explained that the independence of the judiciary would be one of the main assessment criteria. The commissioner's comments were not exclusively limited to Romania, which has been experiencing difficulties over recent weeks, but also to Hungary, against which the Commission has opened a number of different infringement procedures. Reding said that, “this is the second time in the past few months” that the European Parliament has debated attacks on democracy in a member state. The commissioner pointed out that the EU lacked a legal tool with which to assess its members.
In the morning, José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, also sharply criticised the recent attacks on European democratic values, during his address on the State of the Union, and called for tools to be introduced to monitor fundamental standards in member states and to provide the Commission with more developed resources than it presently possesses, between “the soft power of political persuasion” and that at the opposite end of the spectrum, nuclear weapons, as contained in Article 7 of the treaty, which also stipulates the removal of a member state's voting rights at the Council, explained the Commission president.
On Friday 14 September, in Brussels, Barroso will receive the Romanian president who has recently resumed his role, Traian Basescu, and on Monday he will meet the Romanian prime minister, Victor Ponta. (SP/trans/fl)