No value threshold for abuse of service
The Romanian Chamber of Deputies voted the bills amending the Criminal and Criminal Procedure Codes
Ştefan Stoica, 06.04.2023, 13:50
Amending the Criminal and Criminal Procedure Codes is a milestone within the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, therefore an obligation assumed by Romania in exchange for the money promised by the European Union. The latest changes target abuse and negligence in the service. Coming from the Senate, where they had triggered a scandal, with the ruling coalition voting for a threshold of 250,000 lei up to which abuse and negligence in the service would not be considered a crime, the bills were drastically amended by the deputies, who eliminated any value threshold . They proceeded in this way, although the Ministry of Justice had proposed, according to the version adopted by the Senate and blamed by the opposition and the press, a much lower threshold, of 9,000 lei, from which the two acts would have been criminalized.
Successive thinking and unthinking within the coalition, promptly criticized by the opposition parties, eventually led to the removal of the threshold for abuse of office. Thus, according to the article, the act of the civil servant who does not perform an act provided by a law or performs it in violation of a provision included in such a normative act, causing damage or an injury to the rights or legitimate interests of a natural or legal person is punishable by imprisonment from 2 to 7 years and loses the right to hold a public office. The threshold for negligence in the service was also removed, in which case the sanction is either imprisonment from 3 months to 3 years, or a fine. The absence of any value threshold could raise problems of unconstitutionality. The Court had previously established that a value threshold for the criminalization of the act is necessary, as long as a damage caused by the said act is calculated.
Amending the Criminal Procedure Code has the potential to generate controversy too. The reason is that the possibility of using interceptions made by the specialized services as evidence in the case of several offenses, including tax evasion and corruption, has been maintained. Although part of the coalition, the Democratic Union of Ethnic Hungarians in Romania abstained from voting in this case. The leader of the party, Kelemen Hunor, said that the intelligence services have nothing to do with the criminal process. If the Romanian Intelligence Service has a role in the criminal process, we can no longer talk about independent justice and we are going back 10 years ago, the UDMR leader warned. The matter deserved a serious debate in Parliament. For years, the services have been accused by all parties of being involved in the political game, of opening cases that could compromise one politician or another. And the use as evidence in corruption processes of records obtained by services through specific means risks fueling suspicions on this topic. (MI)
