Almost two years since the Constitutional Court ruled that the use of the Communist symbols – the hammer and sickle - is constitutional, the lawmakers passed in the first reading a bill to abrogate the legal provisions banning the use of these symbols. The bill was put forward by the Communist faction, IPN reports.

According to the authors of the bill, by adopting the provisions that ban the Communist symbols, Parliament made a mistake as, in the absence of an official conviction and without proving the causal connection between the regime and a symbol, it associated these symbols with all the possible and impossible crimes.

The law that bans the use of the hammer and sickle was adopted by Parliament on July 12, 2012. After the Communists filed a challenge, the Constitutional Court sought help from the Venice Commission, which said that the banning of the Communist symbols runs counter to the European Convention on Human Rights. A year ago, President Nicolae Timofti said he would support a parliamentary initiative to revote a law that would ban the use of the Communist symbols.