Ioana Lupea: "The story that follows is based on real events and any resemblance with the daily experiences of hundred of thousands of Romanians in the public institutions is not accidental."
Is the violent history, traumatizing and unclosed of the legalization of a sentence emitted by the Sector 4 Courthouse Bucharest. A place where the ramp for persons with disabilities, built in an approximately 70 grades angle, is a mockery, if not the invention of a sadist.
The Sector 4 Courthouse, as many other institutions of this state, doesn't has a public relations office. The informations regarding the procedures can be find out,if you have a good sight, from posters in A4 format, from Xerox or the policeman at the entrance. To legalize a sentence you must first ask for the file at the archives. The road of the documents from one room to another of the same building can last even a month. The sentence decided on a public session by a judge is not definitive, irrevocable and legal without a judiciary stamp of 15 lei and a two lei tax payed in the Mayoralty's account. The tax is not payed at CEC, as a piece a paper sticked on the door of the archives of the Sector 4 Courthouse wrongfully guides you, but to the Treasury. You warn the clerk for the mistake that cost you a half of Bucharest way. He raises his shoulders: "It's not my door!". The sum can be payed by post if you can find out, through a wonder, the bank account of the mayoralty and its fiscal code. The next step is to buy two forms, of for copying, the other for legalization, to fill them out and attend the last of the five imposed queues - CEC or Treasury, Post office, the court's archives, the copying office -, in front of the Registrature. Here you will spend, on your feet, hours without the guarantee of a victory: the schedule with the public is only four hours long.
Every tax means a new pay-office, every pay-office a new capricious clerk, every clerk, a new queue, and every queue, corruption. To legalize a court sentence you must attend five queues. Or not even one is you give a "bribe" to the right man, as it is said by Piedone, also called the mayor of sector 4. The queues from the hospitals, from auto registers, from courthouses, financial administrations, decentralized agencies, directions for taxes, offices of population evidence, Electrica headquarters are real focus-groups. There, the citizens are freely expressing their feelings toward the aggressor state. The rage is followed by the resentment: you admit the trouble or you pay the bribe. The anger doesn't go away, is changes into aggression, lack of solidarity, escape of society.
I once asked an important politician, who was justifying his traffic of influence through the fight with bureaucracy, why he is not starting a law project; in the end, he has the power. The answer was short :"This thing is impossible". No party won't assume the cut of bureaucracy as a governmental project as long as the long as in the local and centralized administration are working almost a million voters. Instead of cutting bureaucracy through the improvement of the public services, the Romanian state is employing each year new bureaucrats for whom it will invent new taxes, new pay-offices, new queues. We can only feel with a grind the violence exercised by this state on us through bureaucracy.
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