PRESS RELEASE

URR demands dignitaries responsibility and
imediat uncovering of their interest conflicts

The Party The Union for the Reconstruction of Romania-URR launches a new form of interaction between a political party and the civil society – public forums for debating our proposals for sectorial policies. Discussions in each forum will start from a set of actions URR intends to promote in its political action and which can undergo further changes according to arguments and alternatives proposed and debated by forum participants.
The first forum attacks an issue as much covered in the press as resistant in the present - political corruption in Romania. It will be launched on Monday, 5th of Augus 2002, on www.urr.ro website.

From URR point of view, one of the main cause of corruption in Romania represents the superior model "if the boss takes moeney, I will also", or the less harmful "if the boss asks me to take money and part the gain with him then that is the rule". From this reason we consider that measures against corruption must provoke a change in the way people in the higher political and administrative state structures act. Dignitres responsibility and imediat uncovering of interest conflicts must be done down the hierarchy.
In this respect, the first proposals of URR through which we provoke the current political class and the ones unhappy with it, are the following:

• Dignitaries (presidency, government, Parliament, mair offices) and their first line relatives cannot receive, during their term, no present with a value above 10 million lei, irrespective of the occasion;
• Publicly declare the fortune of dignitaries and their first line relatives in the moment of running for office, investment and leaving office;
• Incompatibility of the dignitary function with practicing law as attorney and having interests in private companies which do business with the State, whether their own or their first line relatives';
• of dignitaries and their first line relatives must not be members in administrative offices of enterprises or institutions which forming organisms create, rule, control or whose services they use;
• PMs or members of local and district offices who resign or are excluded from the party from the list of which they were chosen must be replaced with the next candidate on the list;
• elimination of the secret vote from Parliament and introducing a system of monitoring each MP vote for a law, monitoring permanently accessible to the public;
• limiting parliamentary immunity exclusively to political declarations;
• subordination of the National Anticorruption Parchet to the President of Romania, with separate budget allocation, established by law;
• creating a functional national ground for witness protection and establishment of system for punishment negotiation for persons sub ancheta in order to facilitate the uncovering the people who are actually running Mafia actions (influence traffic, auction fraud, commission taking, blackmail, intimidation, money laundry, false declarations, etc.) from political and administrative structures;
• semestrial publishing, in the Official Monitor, of the cashflow by all parties under incidence of the law.
  

Other interest areas will be posted on the web one by one, and are open to anyone, and discussions in forums will be moderated by URR members.

Discussion forums will be open until 1st of October, from that date on following he internal definitivation of sectorial policies that will make the subject of final debate in the National Convention of Union for the Reconstruction of Romania - URR, this fall.

Cosmin Alexandru
President, Union for the Reconstruction of Romania - URR