In the next month Romania must prove to the European Commission that it is making some progress against the corruption that has run throughout its politics and public life. It must show that it is dragging its courts and judges farther from the communist era and closer to 21st-century Europe.

The task of convincing Brussels falls on Romania's new Justice Minister, Catalin Marian Predoiu, who faces scepticism, frustration and even anger from Brussels. Since Romania and Bulgaria joined the EU in January 2007 the Commission's reports have noted in alarm that the pair, let in before they were really ready, have lost all incentive to improve, and that in corruption (and in Bulgaria's case, murder by organised crime), their standards are unacceptable. Officials say that if the July reports are bad, sanctions could follow.

Predoiu, a 39-year-old commercial lawyer, takes on a brief that others have failed to master. In Romania's struggles to haul itself out of the era of Nicolae Ceausescu, the dictator executed in 1989, the Justice Ministry has been at the heart of the storm. One of Predoiu's predecessors, Monica Macovei, became a hero in Brussels and at home for her pursuit of corrupt high-level officials and politicians.

Then she was sacked, by the Prime Minister, Calin Popescu-Tariceanu, as part of his feud with President Traian Basescu. Her first successor, Tudor Chiuariu, resigned in December, under investigation for corruption (which he denied). The Defence Minister held the baton as a stopgap, and now Mr Predoiu takes it up. “It is fair to say that reforms lost speed,” he said yesterday in London. “But we have a new attitude now: we really want to solve this problem.” He believes he has good accounts of progress on three of the four benchmarks set by the Commission: on a new legal framework (writing the new civil and criminal codes; setting up a National Agency for Integrity; and reforming local bureaucracy to squeeze out small-scale corruption.

On this, he is particularly convincing. Driving licence applications are now made online, removing the face-to-face contact that leads to bribes. But it remains to be seen whether the new Inspector for Integrity, with powers to investigate the income and assets of those in public life, actually has bite, or proves to be another example of Romania professing change but failing to deliver.

The new legal framework faces a worse problem: the need for approval by parliament, itself in disarray, with factional feuding. That leads to the worst problem impeding Romania's compliance: the clause of the constitution that says that parliament must approve the bringing of all cases against former or current members of parliament. There are three cases waiting for such approval, including charges against the former Prime Minister, Adrian Nastase; eight others identified by prosecutors have not yet been submitted to parliament.

This is the single reason why Romania has failed to prosecute high-level officials, the fourth of the Commission's benchmarks. As Predoiu points out, “we have hundreds of cases” at lower levels that have been sent to court. He agrees, in his personal opinion, that it is unfortunate that the constitution includes this clause, but given that it does, “as Justice Minister, I have no way to intervene”. But progress on this front is perhaps the only way to satisfy Romania's growing number of critics.

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