The claims or complaints submitted to the courts of law in Russian are sent back to the applicants. The situation in southern Moldova is different – the applications in Romanian are not examined, IPN reports, quoting an article published in the July 30 edition of the newspaper “Panorama”.

A woman came to the paper’s editorial office and said that the complaint filed by her to court in Russian wasn’t examined and she was given time to ‘correct the fault’. “The judge argued that the application was written with violations and that it was in Russian. He made reference to Article 24 of the Civil Code concerning the procedural language and the right to translator,” reads the article.

The president of the Supreme Court of Justice Mihai Poalelungi admitted to the existence of the linguistic problem in the Moldovan courts. According to him, some of the judges refuse to examine the applications in Russian because there is an acute shortage of translators in courts.

“Earlier, they (the translators – e.n.) were considered public servants, but their status was recently modified. As a result, the Supreme Court of Justice cannot fill the vacancies that appeared in almost all the national courts,” Mihai Poalelungi stated for “Panorama”.

According to a member of the Supreme Court of Magistrates, whom the author of the article asked to make a comment, the linguistic problem in the national courts of law is not clear as in some regions they do not obey the rule that the applications must be submitted in the official language. In the southern districts, practically all the cases are tried in Russian and the documents are thus also in Russian.