Following the consultation and review process of the draft law on Public Participation in Decision-Making, the draft law has been significantly weakened. The authors removed provisions, allowing citizens to challenge violations of public participation obligations through administrative courts. Moldovan civil society organisations (CSOs) emphasise that the absence of enforceable accountability mechanisms could undermine the implementation of the new law, allowing public authorities to ignore its provisions with little consequences.
What was removed and why it matters
As previously report under the CSO Meter, the draft law on Public Participation in the Decision-Making Process was subjected to public consultations in March 2026. A revised version of the draft was subsequently made publicly available by the State Chancellery in May 2026.
The original draft included Articles 22 and 23, which granted any person whose rights were violated the ability to challenge public authority actions or inaction in administrative courts. Both articles were removed entirely in the revised version. The authors justified the deletion by arguing that general administrative law already provides adequate contestation procedures.
On 19 May 2026, 24 CSOs raised serious concerns about the revised draft law in a public position note. The signatory organisations dispute the reasoning of the authors, noting that the Administrative Code explicitly excludes the legislative drafting and adoption procedure from its scope. This means that judicial remedies for breaches of public consultation rules remain, at best, unclear and, at worst, unavailable. The CSOs warn that, ‘without enforceable accountability mechanisms, the new law risks becoming merely a catalogue of good practices, that public authorities can disregard with minimal consequences’.
Individual sanctions instead of institutional accountability
The current version of the draft provides only for individual disciplinary and administrative liability, with a vague reference that amendments to the Contraventions Code will be proposed at a later stage. This approach misses the nature of the problem: violations of public participation requirements are often institutional. These include unpublished drafts, unrealistically short deadlines, and consultations held without meaningful access for affected groups. Sanctioning an individual official does not remedy the exclusion of the public from the decision-making process.
A 2025 analysis by CPR Moldova, INSPIRED and Promo-LEX underscores this concern, noting that the existing Law No. 239/2008 on Transparency in Decision-Making suffers from the same flaw: it provides for disciplinary or administrative liability, but establishes no contestation mechanism. The Contraventions Code further limits liability to a narrow case of local public authorities and only the adoption of a normative act whose draft was not published for public consultation.
What CSOs are demanding
The 24 signatory CSO call on the authors of the draft law to:
- Reinstate a specific contestation mechanism for violations of public participation procedures;
- Introduce the possibility of suspending or annulling acts adopted in breach of participation requirements, and of ordering mandatory consultations;
- Present the proposed amendments to the Contraventions Code simultaneously with the draft law, with a guarantee that they will enter into force together;
Consider institutional-level measures, following the model of Law No. 148/2023 on Access to Public Information, which allows judicial challenges against authorities, not just individuals, for failing to publish information.
The draft law is still a meaningful step forward for Moldova's democratic governance. However, the removal of judicial appeal mechanisms and the absence of institutional accountability represent significant gaps that risk undermining the entire framework. The Parliament is expected to adopt the law in October 2026, leaving a narrow, but real window to restore the accountability provisions. Civil society advocacy should focus on ensuring that the final text includes enforceable obligations, a dedicated contestation mechanism, and concurrent amendments to the Contraventions Code. A law without consequences for non-compliance is a law in name only.