The Adventure of Adopting the Romanian Administrative Code: Context, Challenges and Paradoxes

In the lately decades, all the European countries were involved into a movement of modernization of the public administration, in order to bring it closer to the citizens and to their social needs. The distance between the political speech, the objectives of the reform process and the reality is still very wide, so the premise needed to obtain this aim, is to have a clear, logical and systematized legal frame. The Romanian law that regulates public administration often contains a parallelism of regulations, or even worst, they contradict each other, or some of the dispositions are lacunars. This is the main reason for the necessity to adopt an Administrative Code or an Administrative Procedure Code. All the programs of governance after the Romanian Revolution bring this idea on the top, the Romanian doctrine in the last 20 years (and even before) claimed for the adoption of an administrative code, but until now, nothing became concrete. The delay in adopting the Administrative Procedure Code is started since 2004, when the draft of the code was finished. Only in 2008 the Romanian authorities have started the legislative procedure in order to adopt this code, but, unfortunately, the procedures were blocked in 2009. As a matter of consequence, a new project of Administrative Code (this time) begun, being coordinated by ones of the bests theoreticians and practitioners in the public administration from Romania. The new project, financed by European founds was finished at the end of 2011. The responsibility for transposing it into reality belongs now to the Parliament. Our study will analyze the European highlights contained in this draft, from the perspective of a good administration’s values. One of the main dimensions of a European administration refers to the transparency in the functioning of public institutions at the central and local level. We will analyze from a comparative view the provisions in the current legislation and in the drafts of Administrative (Procedure) Codes, by enlightening the progresses, but also the things that still need to be clarified or improved in the future regulation.