A president without a compass. Klaus Iohannis and „his people”, a serious attack on freedom of the press and the G4Media.ro

President Klaus Iohannis expressed on Tuesday his first reaction on a subject of utmost importance, a week after the first articles published exclusively by G4Media.ro on national security laws. In essence, they significantly increase the powers of the secret services. These draft laws are the work of intelligence services, not of the politicians. They were to be adopted by the government and sent to parliament for approval. This has not yet happened, although it was due to happen last week.

The head of state avoided commenting on the content of the laws, but made a point of saying publicly that „people are worried”. No, it’s not about the public opinion, it’s about ordinary people, like you and me, rightly worried that Romania is about to officially become one big military unit.

Klaus Iohannis spoke on behalf of others. „Someone, and we know who thought it best to leak them. It’s a major mistake, people are worried,” the head of state said on Tuesday. So, the president of the country is very concerned, as are the „people” in the intelligence services, as they are the authors of the bills, that this has come to light. He doesn’t care much about the content. There he fixed it from the tip of his lips: ‘If certain approaches in the first draft are not correct, they will be corrected. Nobody wants a restoration of the old Securitate”. It may be bad, it may not, we’ll see.

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But his number one concern is to warn us publicly, to send a subtle threat that he is watching G4Media.ro and possibly our sources. How dare a head of state in an EU country, question the sources of an independent news site? How arrogant have the president and his „people” become if they have gone so far as to threaten the press and its sources out loud?

I repeat, this is a serious attack on the freedom of the press by the most powerful man in the state, backed by an apparatus of force that illegitimately, illegally and unjustifiably provided him with information about journalists’ sources. In any democratic state, the head of the secret service who is spying on journalists in an attempt to find out their sources must be dismissed as a matter of urgency. These are acts of extreme gravity in any democracy.

Has the mere publication of illegal drafts of laws, repeat, illegal, become a threat to national security?

Only Liviu Dragnea asked the prosecutor’s office in April 2018, when he was running the country like his own estate, to investigate G4Media.ro because of the revelations published about the Bucharest government’s intention to support the move of the Romanian embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, in defiance of the EU position.

Instead of holding the Intelligence Service to account for all the horrors that have been slipped into national security laws, President Iohannis is at war with the press for daring to publish them. In other words, all the effort of the Romanian state over the last week has been channeled into identifying G4Media.ro’s sources. President Iohannis then triumphantly announces „we know who” and calls the leaking/publication of the law projects „a major error”, which is simply a serious attack on the freedom of the press.

We, the G4Media.ro or our sources are not the problem, Mr. President Klaus Iohannis. „A major error” is, first and foremost, the fact that national security laws were written by the secret services. These institutions have no right to initiate laws under the current rules. They added this right in their draft laws, which they do not enjoy now.

So the intelligence services have committed an illegal act by writing a draft law, which should have been drafted by the Government, of course, in consultation and collaboration with specialists from these institutions.

Another ‘major error’, Mr. President Iohannis, is to force citizens to cooperate with the secret services, without setting limits or extraordinary conditions that might require forcing someone to cooperate. Perhaps in the case of terrorist attacks, war, or other exceptional situations. Unfortunately, these cases are not specified in the draft laws.

In the draft laws, snitching becomes generally mandatory at the request of the intelligence officers.

If you read the draft laws carefully, Mr President, you will see that they are full of ‘major errors’: the immunity granted to intelligence officers, who can only be investigated or searched at their premises with the approval of the Head of State and by specifically appointed prosecutors, the extension of threats to national security to almost all areas of activity, the disregard for the decisions of the Constitutional Court, the return, through the back door, as it were, of the intelligence services as criminal investigation bodies, the elimination of mechanisms for democratic control of the intelligence services, the operational funds handled by them, the lifetime tenure for the heads of secret services, the legalization of covert companies, etc.

Taken together, the draft laws make the SRI and the SIE an out-of-control superpowers.

Doesn’t all this sound like the old Securitate? What do you mean, nobody wants restoration, since the draft laws have landed on the table of the coalition parties as if they had been thought up by Nicolae Pleșiță or Iulian Vlad, not by the intelligence services of a NATO and EU member country.

Don’t you think that you should rather have identified the author of the horrors in the national security draft laws, before having „worried people” dig for G4Media.ro sources? Shouldn’t you rather ask the heads of those secret services to account for the fact that, under their unlimited mandate, Romania has become a militarized state, that the parties, the press, and the judiciary have become completely irrelevant, and that this reality has been enshrined in law?

Your role, Mr President, is to mediate between the powers of the state and between the state and society at times of major crisis such as this, not to join forces with the secret services to the detriment of democracy. Read again Article 80(2) of the Romanian Constitution:

„The President of Romania shall ensure respect for the Constitution and the proper functioning of the public authorities. To this end, the President shall mediate between the powers of the State and between the State and society”.
You have abdicated your constitutional role for an unknown number of times in recent years, Mr President, and you have committed a major deviation from the rules of democracy. Like the parties and much of the press, you have become the prisoner of a shadow power that is increasingly spreading over the country.

You will soon become a lame duck in their eyes, i.e. irrelevant if you are not already halfway through your second term. You still have the power and influence to stop the transformation of Romania, under your tenure as an internationally awarded president, into a country ruled by law, by the intelligence services, into a veritable military democracy, in which citizens will only have a future as collaborators.

Translated from Romanian by Ovidiu H.