64 rT ansitional Justice and Democratic Consolidation in post-communist aE stern uE rope: Romania and Albania. On the other hand, Romania initially had an active political prisoner’s association that with time started to falter. As Stan (2013) reports: “[t]he Association of Former Political Prisoners in Romania (Asociaţia Foştilor Deţinuţi Politici din România), constituted in 1990 in Bucharest, had branches throughout the country and a membership that reportedly diminished from 98,700 in 1990 to 45,000 by 2000.” This has often been the case in other CEE countries and variables such as time, age, and political divisions have all been instrumental in the failure to sustain political momentum. On behalf of this alliance of former political prisoners, senator Constantin Ticu Dumitrescu: promoted lustration through his Bill on Access to Files and Unveiling the Securitate as a Political Police which, in its original version, permitted citizens to read the secret files compiled on them by the Securitate and asked public officials and electoral candidates unveiled as former secret agents to give up their posts or renounce the electoral race. After bitter debates, Parliament stripped the bill of its lustration stipulations. When the bill was adopted as Law 187/1999, Dumitrescu was so dissatisfied with the changes operated by the house that he refused to accept the text’s paternity (Stan 2000). The most successful period regarding the calls for necessity of lustration in Romania was between 2005-07, where the Liberal-Democrats ruled the country. As Stan (2011) recalls: [i]nspired by Bulgarian efforts, in 2006 Romanian journalists launched a Clean Voices campaign to identify secret agents from among television reporters, press contributors, and talk-show hosts. In response, Liberal legislators presented a lustration bill, the opposition lodged its own anti-nomenklatura legislative proposal, intellectuals, academics, and civil society representatives called on former and current spies to unveil their ties to communist and post-communist intelligence services, and many politicians admitted to past collaboration or were unmasked as former spies. More importantly, civil society groups convinced the Chamber of Deputies leaders to jointly organize a public debate on “Lustration: Principle or Instrument” on 25 May 2006. Besides legislators and ordinary citizens, representatives of 10 civil society groups—including the Timişoara Society, the Civic Alliance, and the Association of Former Political Prisoners—stated their position on this important transitional justice practice. Thus, consistent to my thesis here, Romania and Albania shared same civil society vocation for lustration and other forms of radical break with communist pasts, given the similarity of their communist regimes, but there was little political will to see through enactment of legislation, pursue real trials that would purge or consistently ban from office former nomenklatura members and other transitional justice mechanisms. Below I will expand on these in Romania’s case. Romania’s transitional justice measures Romania’s trials opened up with the show trial of former Communist dictator Nikolae Caushesku and his wife Elena that ended up with their summary shooting and is still going on today. The last trial in Romania is against Ion Ilesku, the former communist-turned-democrat, responsible for the trial against Caushesku, who in April 2019 is getting charged with crimes against humanity for events that took place in 1988, together with deputy Prime Minister Gelu Voican Voiculescu and former Air Force Cdr Iosif Rus.12 The trials against former members of communist nomeklatura have started since 1989, immediately after the fall of the ancien regime. Civil society from those earlier days was very much supporting and making calls for such swift trials as a clean 12. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47858664