Președintele Senatului Călin Popescu Tăriceanu a trimis pe 18 noiembrie o scrisoare către liderii din ALDE european, în care îşi exprimă dezamăgirea faţă de conţinutul rezoluţiei adoptate de Parlamentul European.
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Dear Collegues,
It is with a significant amount of disappointment that I am writing this letter to the ALDE group in the European Parliament.
For us, Romanian Liberals assembled in the National Liberal Party from 1990 to 2014 and in the ALDE RO since 2014 it was a constant source of pride to be members of the European political family of the Liberals and Democrats. The only reason for our membership in ALDE, before and after 2014, was the need to share with like-minded politicians from various European countries our Liberal convictions and to contribute to the best of our abilities to a less bureaucratic and a more liberal make up of the European Union.
We deeply regret that the ALDE group did not consult with us in any institutional form when adopting its position on The European Parliament Resolution on the Rule of Law in Romania of the 13th of November 2018. The said Resolution is based almost exclusively on biased accounts of the matter under review, provided by interested parties, more precisely on "communications”, "exchanges of view", "opinions”, "reports”, "debates on threats to the rule of law in Romania" and "repeated mass protests”. Even if the Resolution states that "the EU operates on the basis of the presumption of mutual trust that Member States act in conformity with democracy, the rule of law and fundamental rights", such presumption is completely absent from the text of the document. Not a single position of the Executive, Legislative or Judicial branches of the Romanian Government is ever mentioned. The Resolution in its entirety is rooted in a profound distrust in the Romanian authorities and in a presumption of guilt with regard to all Romanian officials.
As Liberals, we are seriously concerned to see the ALDE group and the European Parliament at large staging a public accusatory practice that for us Romanians is reminiscent of the totalitarian past. Nothing is less liberal and more alien to the European political tradition than a representative Assembly engaged in prosecutorial performances against some of its members. We are already accustomed to the European Commission treating some Member States as offenders, but we are unpleasantly surprised to see the European Parliament following this kind of dividing procedures and undermining the mutual trust that it has the duty to establish between the citizens of all the countries it represents.
We do however appreciate that some of the members of the ALDE group voted against the Resolution, and hope that their balanced and critical reasoning will become in the future the norm of behavior for all Liberal member parties and individual MEPs.
Sincerely yours,
Calin Popescu-Tariceanu Bucharest,18.11.2018
President of ALDE Ro
President of the Romanian Senate