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| THE REFORM OF THE JUDICIARY THROUGH CODES 17/03/2009 |
| (2009-03-17) |
| Last updated: 2009-03-17 15:43 EET |
A sine qua non condition for Brussels to lift the monitoring of the Romanian justice system, the government’s four draft codes – criminal, civil, criminal and civil procedure – have already caused a stir in Bucharest. The government has submitted the four codes to Parliament, in the hopes that it will pas them in an emergency procedure. And that should unfold extremely easily, given that the Cabinet made up of the Social Democrats and the Liberal Democrats has the support of more than 70% of the MPs.
All the more so, the initiators of the codes said, as the new regulations tend to measure up to the European standards, simplify procedures and guarantee the celerity of the processes. However, early reactions are indicative of protracted and elaborated debates over that matter. The Justice Minister, former liberal and independent Catalin Predoiu, for whom codes are a pending issue dating back to the time when the former cabinet made up of the National Liberals and the Democratic Union of Ethnic Hungarians in Romania was in power, even felt compelled to gave assurances that the provisions of the codes were not targeted against civil rights and liberties; quite the contrary
“The codes aim at the consolidation and recognition of those rights and, if required, we will bring up the whole set of arguments to clarify the stance we took in good faith, when drafting those codes.”
The Criminal and the Criminal Procedure Code are not perfect, they are perfectible – Romania’s General Prosecutor Laura Codruta Kovesi admitted. In line with the head of the National Anti-Corruption Directorate, Daniel Morar, Kovesi warned that, with the number of sentences being halved, the new codes might trigger the prescription of a series of corruption cases. NGOs have voiced similar opinions, also drawing attention to the fact that the fight against corruption will be seriously affected. In turn, the Romanian Press Club has criticized what it called the bureaucracy and the narrow-mindedness with which the authorities have treated the media, as the former approved the amendments to the Civil Code.
The Romanian daily paper ROMANIA LIBERA headlined that the aforementioned amendments ”have even triggered the war between the media and the Government”, as they try to “muzzle-strap the media” through 12 articles that, among other things, could prevent journalists from making public information of public interest. Media unions, quoted by the Romanian daily paper ZIUA were adamant when pointing their fingers at the communist norms laid down in those codes, “drafted overnight by the Justice Ministry without consultations with any media organization, with all that purposefully occurring in a year with high electoral stakes”, meaning the Euro-parliamentary elections in the summer and the presidential election due in autumn.
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