In the Republic of Moldova, there is an insufficient number of cases for creating a specialized anticorruption court. The existence of such a court would not be justified from the viewpoint of the juridical necessities, would run counter to the process of optimizing the judicial map and, in essence, would go against the objectives to fight corruption declared by the authorities, says an analysis by the Legal Resources Center of Moldova (CRJM), which is quoted by IPN.
According to the authors, the acts of corruption or those related to corruption are not larger in number than other types of criminal cases. In 2015-2019, the average number of criminal cases concerning the acts of corruption examined by courts of law was 199 cases a year at a time when the average annual assignment of each judge during the past five years was of about 620 cases. If an anticorruption court is created, the nine judges who will work there will have the smallest workload - 22 cases a year per judge.
The examination of all the cases of corruption by one court of law that will be probably situated in the municipality of Chisinau will create difficulties in examining the cases in regions or will require that all the participants in the trial travel to the capital city. It should be noted that during the last two years, about 2/3 of the cases of corruption were examined in regional courts.
The cases of corruption can be easily examined by the common law courts that sometimes deal with more difficult cases. The analysis of the experience of the states where there are courts of law specialized in cases of corruption didn’t convincingly prove the efficiency of these courts. “Consequently, it is rather naive to hope that the activity of a court of law specialized in anticorruption will be sufficient for efficiently fighting corruption,” Daniel Goinic, legal adviser at the Legal Resources Center of Moldova, stated in the analysis presentation event.
The authors of the document recommend trying the cases of corruption not by the place of the commission of the offense, but by the place of the investigation body (subdivisions of the NAC/eventually of the Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office), and the specialization of judges of several courts. According to them, this will enable to increase judges’ capacities of dealing with cases of corruption without creating an expensive court and of easily exposing it to influence from third parties.
In Moldova, the idea of creating an anticorruption court was launched by the Ministry of Justice in 2015. In 2020, the national authorities returned to this initiative even if, according to the authors of the document, the creation of an anticorruption court runs counter to the set objectives and the actions taken during the last few years, when all the specialized courts of law were liquated.
