Law experts criticize the sentence “any other orientation than the pro-European one is a priori non-constitutional” from the Constitutional Court’s decision concerning the Association Agreement with the EU. The opinions were stated in the program “Politics” on TV 7 channel, IPN reports.
Ion Dron, chairman of the Association “Justice and Fairness”, said this phrase has a political, not legal basis. “The Constitutional Court must work based on the juridical norms. Regretfully, a part of the decisions taken by it are political in character. The fact that the Constitutional Court took a correct decision when it ruled that the Association Agreement is constitutional is not questioned. But this sentence should be explained by the court as the rights of other people might be infringed by it,” he stated.
Supreme Council of Magistrates member Teo Carnat also considers that this sentence is unlawful. “Things will calm down. This sentence appeared in a communiqué on the official website of the Constitutional Court. But we cannot pronounce until we didn’t see the exact text of the decision published in the Official Gazette. It’s clear that this sentence runs counter to a number of democratic values such as pluralism of opinions and party pluralism,” he said.
Former member of the Central Election Commission Pavel Midrigan also criticized the given sentence. “It’s not for the first time that the Constitutional Court takes contradictory decisions. In the case of Vlad Filat, it exceeded its authority as only Parliament can decide if a person can hold a particular public post or not. This court is not elected by the people, but it is the people who should decide the foreign development course,” stated the jurist.
Constitutional law expert Vitali Catana said the given sentence does not form part of the text of the Constitutional Court’s decision and it is an editing mistake. “Someone wanted to present the essence of the court’s decision, in a succinct form. I presume that the Constitutional Court, in its decision, tried to define democracy, while the person who edited the communiqué interpreted things incorrectly,” he stated.
The given sentence caused heated debates on the political left, with the candidate of the party “Patria” (“Motherland”) Grigore Petrenco saying the decision was taken with the aim of removing the parties with a non-European orientation from the electoral race.