Claudiu Drăguşin said on Friday that he will not participate in the referendum on justice announced by President Nicuşor Dan.
„The issue of the referendum must be analyzed on multiple levels. First of all, it has no legal or constitutional basis, let alone constitutional. On the other hand, it is (…) a way of keeping a system under tension. I don’t understand why. Perhaps the president is interested in knowing exactly what the atmosphere is like in the courts. But if he wants to know what the atmosphere is like in the courts, we have provided two measurements. One was done by us, the SCM, after Recorder (…) because we wanted to ask our colleagues if such a phenomenon really exists, if there are people removed from the court without consent, if things like this happen. We conducted a consultation, and I believe about 2,700 judges responded, and this phenomenon was denied. There was only one colleague who remained anonymous who said that he had been removed from the panel and that your perception was related to the statute of limitations. But one colleague out of 2,500… We made this data available to the president and added some European measurements from March, before the whole discussion about pensions and so on began. A European measurement made on, I believe, 1,600 judges. That’s how many responded from Romania, but we were the third country in terms of number of judges in Europe, and there, too, all aspects of the abusive CSM are treated in the same way, from the court president who imposes solutions. And there are measurements taken, there are statements from our colleagues, if they ever felt pressured by the SCM or the court president,” says Drăguşin.
The judge says he does not know what his fellow magistrates will decide, but his personal attitude will be not to respond to this referendum: „My colleagues in the court are free to do as they please, but I would like to tell you, to reveal the answer of a colleague from one of the reviews, just the other day I was at a review and he said that he would respond to the questions for the referendum, just as a president responded to the request to send the pension law back to Parliament.”
According to Drăguşin, if there are colleagues who are dissatisfied with the work of the SCM, there is a procedure for revoking SCM members, with institutional mechanisms.
„If he is concerned or curious about the state of affairs in the courts, we can work together, he can talk to the SCM, he can come to the table, we can send him the measurements, that is, there are ways he can find out,” says Drăguşin about Dan.