\n\tAfter heated debates, but with a large majority of votes, a new statute of the Romanian MP was adopted on Tuesday. In keeping with the new statute, the Romanian senators and deputies will have some restrictions with regard to spending public money, will not be allowed to hire relatives within the parliament\u2019s apparatus, but will be able to hold other offices, if they are clearly established by law, in the education and research fields. The procedure regarding the situations in which a member of parliament is detained, arrested or searched has remained unchanged, but the new document reads that an MP office can only be terminated when there is a final ruling on proven incompatibility or conflict of interests.<\/p>\n
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\n\tIn keeping with the previous regulations, Parliament\u2019s judicial committees analyzed requests for criminal investigation of members of parliament and provided an advisory report, followed by compulsory voting in plenary session. Under the new provisions, there will be no parliament voting if the committees reject prosecutor\u2019s requests, and the latter will have to provide concrete and solid evidence. According to the Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, Valeriu Zgonea, the new statute includes provisions that are also valid for members of the European Parliament, and was adopted by the specialized commission through political dialogue. The statute had to be changed, Valeriu Zgonea also stressed, as the previous one had been drawn up back in 2006, when Romania was not a member of the European Union and the National Integrity Agency did not exist.<\/p>\n
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\n\tValeriu Zgonea: \u201cThe Public Ministry and the National Integrity Agency accepted our amendments. We established a set of procedures that help us know exactly, from the very beginning, what we are supposed to do for four years of mandate.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\n\tAccording to MP Ioan Oltean, a member of the opposition Liberal Democratic Party, the new statute has strengthened deputies and senators\u2019 immunity, and glossed the older one over.<\/p>\n
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\n\tIoan Oltean: \u201c Immunity was strengthened, and conflict of interests encouraged. That is why the Liberal Democratic Party\u2019s parliamentary group voted against it.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\n\tThe MPs members of the Dan Diaconescu\u2019s Party of the People, which is for the first time represented in Romania\u2019s Parliament, refused to participate in the debates.<\/p>\n
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\n\tSenator Tudor Barbu explains: \u201cWe believe that besides the normal immunity that a member of parliament is entitled to politically, and this is regulated at European level, provided it has no criminal implications, there should be no other provision either in the future Constitution, or in any other regulations.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\n\tSix years after its EU accession, Romania is still perceived as a country where the fight against corruption should be fiercer. The previous monitoring reports criticized the Romanian parliament for trying to hamper certain criminal investigations.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The amendments to the statute of the Romanian MP were adopted on Tuesday in Bucharest. The new statute strengthens the immunity of both senators and deputies, against the background of close monitoring of the Romanian judiciary by the EU partners.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":108,"featured_media":42660,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[37738],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-42659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-today-in-the-news"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n