Interim president Ilie Bolojan believes that magistrates should no longer retire at 47 or 50 years old, when they reached professional maturity.

„I, without any populist bias, have said it since last year: we can no longer retire magistrates at 47, at 50, when they are at the age of professional maturity, because we need to capitalize on this experience in public service. It is not just the problem of the level of a pension not being justified by the years of work, but it is also a problem of quality and trust in the justice system, because the higher quality, more predictable sentences you have – in identical cases, in different instances one will have the same sentences. And the number of trials will decrease a lot too,” said Bolojan on Wednesday, on the podcast „Friendly Fire.”

The interim president underscored that „it is one thing to work at the pension value and another to work at retirement age.”

„These are different aspects, they are simply aspects of normality,” Bolojan added.

On Tuesday, a draft law on magistrates’ pensions was submitted to Parliament, initiated by the leaders of the governing coalition.

The proposed normative act provides that, starting with January 1, 2026, judges, prosecutors, judges of the Constitutional Court, assistant magistrates of the High Court of Cassation and Justice and of the CCR (Constitutional Court of Romania), as well as the legal personnel can retire and benefit from the service pension if they meet the condition of minimum 25 years of seniority achieved only in these positions, as well as the condition of age of at least 48 years. At the same time, it is planned to reach the retirement age of 65 for magistrates in 2045, in stages.

AGERPRES