Abstract

On August 6th, 2010, the deadline for redrawing a lustration law passed almost unnoticed in political circles. The history of Romanian lustration, begun five years before, had, thus, come to an end. The paper will be structured in three chapters, each seeking to highlight some of the key characteristics that made it impossible for lustration and reform to be efficiently implemented in Romania. The first chapter, entitled On Lustration, looks at how transitional justice was implemented in other post-communist European states and what key factors that were present there could not be (or are still not) found in Romania. The second chapter, called On Reform, attempts to explain that the true essence of post- communist reform was never completely grasped by Romanian political and civil societies. The third and last chapter, Conclusions, suggests new ways to tackle the issue of transitional justice and highlights the (still present) need for measures that would steadily do away with the negative remnants of Romania’s communist past.