Anticorruption Centre receives letters of thanks from persons once held in custody

Some persons formerly held in custody in the remand unit of the Centre for Combating Economic Crimes and Corruption (CCECC) addressed letters of thanks to the Centre, praising proper detention conditions, stated CCECC director Valentin Mejinschi during a public hearing in Parliament concerning solutions for preventing lost cases in the European Court of Human Rights. The statement by the CCECC director was accompanied by laughs in the audience, while Vladimir Turcan, chair of the parliamentary committee for appointments and immunity, asked him in jest if those persons didn’t ask for further remand. In retort, Mejinschi said there were requests not to transfer them to other remand centres. Referring to the persons who lodged applications with the European Court, Mejinschi stated that they try to use at any cost the European human rights protection mechanism to manipulate the public opinion, to earn undeserved money and divert the attention of the international institutions and national authorities from the essence of the investigated cases. To date, ECHR received 15 applications from the persons investigated by CCECC. In connection with these cases, the Court found that the Centre had admitted a number of violations, including insufficient medical care; application of inhumane and degrading treatment; and restrictions to private conferring with lawyers. Mejinschi asserted that following the ECHR judgements, the Centre hired a doctor in the remand unit, removed the glass partition restricting private meetings with lawyers, and the Center’s officers started to study the ECHR judgements at professional training courses. Gheorghe Amihalachioaie, chairman of the Bar Association Council, has previously said that as long as the attitude towards the European Court’s decisions against the Moldovan Government is kept, the number of applications will further rise, Moldova will be obliged to pay more and more money for damages and will lose reputation at international level. So far, the Strasbourg Court found Moldova guilty in 76 cases and obliged the State to pay the plaintiffs roughly 1.3 million euros.