62 rT ansitional Justice and Democratic Consolidation in post-communist aE stern uE rope: Romania and Albania. reparative transitional justice components. This is a case in point of how early and successful implementation of transitional justice measures effects democratic consolidation. Czech Republic is another equally successful case as the table below illustrates. Romania, on the other hand, although it failed to “enact radical lustration and court trials have been few in number and deficient in procedure” (Stan 2009), it nevertheless has strongly condemned via highest authority of the state, the atrocities of Communist regime, after a report from the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania (Vierita 2012),  thus differentiating itself from most Balkan countries as well as some of its northern neighbors. But Romania has long suffered from a slow start and rather late democratization, making the first real transition of power from (former) communists to opposition only in 1996 (Marginean 1997). Some authors even argue that “Romania has yet to fulfill its second democratization wave” (Craciun 2017),5 while still starting to enact slowly at first and then rapidly its transitional justice measures, which helped rebuild the social fabric in a country which came a long way from a totalitarian past. I will develop the case of Romania in full in the next section that is a comparative case study. Bulgaria has a lot of similarities to Romania’s case, with consecutive governments pushing hard transitional justice measures, such as lustration but being simultaneously criticized by human rights group as violating individual rights by shifting the blame to collective guilt.6 Also, Bulgaria shares same democratic features as Romania in most respects.7 See the table below for a brief summary of CEE countries, regarding their stages of democratic consolidation on one hand and their degree of implementation of transitional justice on the other. Democratic Consolidation High Low Holistic/ Highly Regarded East Germany Czech Republic Romania Bulgaria TJ Low Estonia Slovakia Albania Table 1 5. “Romania needs a second democratic transition. The first one has built new institutions but not a cohesive society; preferred enforcement and hierarchical institutions over the representative ones, and placed too much emphasis on international drivers for change.” 6. On the other hand, Helsinki Watch criticizes Bulgarian government of pushing too far on its decommunistization activities and lustration measures because of “the Constitutional Court’s decision upholding the Panev Law will encourage increased efforts to purge former members of the Bulgarian Communist Party from important positions in academia.” See: https://www.hrw.org/sites/ default/files/reports/BULGARIA938.PDF 7. Ranked partly free by Freedom House, scoring an overall 80 out of 100. See: https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2018/ bulgaria