Eleven Romanian NGOs, including APADOR-CH, are calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Victor Ponta for his abuse of emergency ordinance powers. The organizations wrote last week to the country’s ombudsman to ask him to approach the Constitutional Court in relation to a recent emergency ordinance that allowed the government to amend 26 legislative acts regulating different fields of activity.

The ordinance in question is the second ordinance issued in 2015 and it was given the neutral name ‘Emergency Ordinance to amend legislation and other measures.’ In reality it encompasses 26 emergency ordinances. It was published directly in the Official Gazette on Friday, March 13, without being previously posted on the government’s website for public debate.

Tactics

The NGOs believe that this is a tactic through which the government tries to hide the abundance of emergency ordinance that it adopts. The Romanian government has been criticized many times by both civil society and the European Commission for its abuse of the power to issue emergency ordinances.

The government is basically replacing Parliament. In this way, Romania is being governed by emergency ordinances, issued on the whims of ministers, without public debate and without being properly considered by the constitutional legislature.

This is the sixth referral of this type made to the ombudsman since April 2014. We continue to explain to him that the government is issuing emergency ordinances that need to be challenged at the Constitutional Court because they are neither urgent nor constitutional.

145 ordinances a year

According to one APADOR-CH study, Romania has been in an emergency situation every three days for the past decade (2004-2014). The various governments over the last decade issued a total of 1,548 emergency ordinances, with an average of 145 ordinances per year.

It is unlikely to see a democratic state and a member of the European Union being in a continuous state of emergency for over a decade. For this reason APADOR-CH is calling upon the ombudsman to remind him that it is his role to notify the Constitutional Court of this anomaly. He is supposed to be "the defender of the rights and freedoms of citizens in their relations with public authorities."