EU-driven judicial reforms in Romania: a success story?

Abstract

This article examines the impact of the European Union (EU) and domestic actors on the development of judicial quality (rule of law) across two key dimensions: judicial capacity and judicial impartiality. It argues and shows empirically that although the EU has been crucial in eliciting change in the judicial capacity dimension, it was largely unsuccessful in changing aspects of the judicial impartiality dimension. The author concludes that the EU's involvement in Romania through accession conditionality has been of limited success: that is, the EU had a considerable impact on improving de jure judicial quality, but it was unable to affect rule implementation and thus failed to create de facto judicial quality. Methodologically, this article makes use of a detailed case-study method with process-tracing. Data are drawn from a number of primary and secondary sources such as official governmental documents, reports, surveys and scholarly literature relevant to the topic.