Despite the legislative amendments of 2016, a substantial improvement of the arrest-related practice of judges and prosecutors didn’t take place and the arrest continues to be applied groundlessly, noted the Legal Resources Center of Moldova (CRJM), which issued a communiqué to the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, IPN reports.
The CRJM ascertained that even if the number of arrested persons was the lowest in 2019 compared with the last few years (1,864), the judges continue not to examine in detail the applications for arrest warrants. On the contrary, the application acceptance rate rose to the highest value of the last few years – 93.5%, as opposed to 88.4% in 2018. At the same time, the alternatives to arrest are not sufficiently used.
“The given problems, in general, reside not in the legislation, but rather in the deficient judicial practice that is influenced by the lack of independence of judges and the pro-accusation attitude shown by many of the judges of inquiry. Also, the heavy workload affects the possibility of examining evidence and applications in a highly qualitative way,” the CRJM says in a press release.
In this connection, the CRJM called on the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe to request the Moldovan authorities to make sure that the national judges and prosecutors observe the ECHR guarantees as regards the verification of the fact that the person committed the offense and the examination of all related proofs, that the alternatives to arrest are used efficiently, that investigative judges enjoy full independence and that the legal requirements for naming judges of inquiry offer sufficient guarantees for the effective exercise of their powers.
The CRJM said the Government of the Republic of Moldova pledged to the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe to reduce the unjustified or illegal arrests. On June 2-4 this year, the Committee of Ministers will examine the measures taken in this regard by Moldova, in connection with the monitoring of the implementation of the group of cases Șarban. The given group consists of 14 judgments of the European Court of Human Rights by which different violations of the right to liberty and security of the European Convention on Human Rights were ascertained.
