Amending Criminal Legislation

The government in Bucharest has amended and completed the Criminal and Criminal Procedures Codes through an emergency ordinance.

Roxana Vasile, 19.05.2016, 14:38

The Criminal Code and the Criminal Procedure Code were amended and completed by the Romanian government through an emergency ordinance on Wednesday. According to the technocratic government, the measure was necessary to put the two documents in line with some Constitutional Court rulings. Several EU laws in the field also had to be included in the newly amended package, as Dan Suciu, spokesman for the government explains.

Dan Suciu: “Naturally this law inclusion should have been done in 45 days. Some were under discussion in Parliament and waited to be endorsed. The government decided to issue this emergency ordinance, which comprises a part of the amendments already discussed in Parliament that were still to be voted upon, as well as some others related to the recommendations of the Constitutional Court.

According to Suciu, since the new Criminal and Criminal Procedure Codes came into force, there have been no less than 15 Constitutional Court rulings with a major impact on these laws. For instance, the latest ruling was that a prosecutors interrupting a criminal investigation without the courts control and approval is tantamount to the improper use of prerogative powers. Under the new legislation child molesters will be spending more years behind bars. The new legislation provides for tougher penalties for theft and fraud as well as for cyber crime. If the prejudice exceeds 450 thousand euros, the prison sentence will increase by 50%. There is no predictability in the act of justice in the absence of legislative stability, Justice Minister Raluca Pruna, in whose opinion, major pending issues are being solved through government emergency.

In turn, judge Horatius Dumbrava writes on his Facebook page that by the immediate endorsement of the emergency ordinance, a wide public debate is being missed. The magistrate questions the governments right to undermine the Parliaments legislative prerogatives by resorting to this practice in a Parliamentary democracy. He also comes up with a possible answer: the Legislature is the one which passed the new Criminal and Criminal Procedure Codes, whose texts have often been declared unconstitutional. As the MPs cannot be held accountable for passivity, is the government to be blamed for having resorted to an emergency ordinance to settle the issue?