The bill to amend and supplement the Law on Domestic Trade and the Contravention Code and reduce the use of plastic bags should be reviewed before it is submitted to Parliament for adoption. The informative note to the bill does not contain sufficient reasoning for passing this legislative initiative, consider experts of the Center for the Analysis and Prevention of Corruption (CAPC), who appraised the vulnerability of the bill.
Analysis author, CAPC associate expert Radu Jigau in a news conference at IPN said the authors of the bill didn’t present arguments and a synthetic based on statistics concerning the ecological issue in Moldova. “The authors only formulate declarative statements and plainly describe the ecological situation in Moldova, especially as regards the use of plastic bags,” he stated.
According to the expert, the implementation of the bill implies costs both for business entities and for consumers. “In such a situation, we consider the authors should have analyzed the costs that are to be supported by the business entities, the state and the consumers from economic and financial viewpoints,” stated Radu Jigau, adding that the benefits of the implementation of this bill should have been presented too.
The expert noted that the bill does not contain an analysis of the regulatory impact either. “Such an analysis was necessary given that the bill will have an impact on the entrepreneurial activity and on society in general,” stated Radu Jigau. According to him, if the law is adopted, the business entities will have to replace the plastic bags and to decide by themselves how to do this as the bill authors offer no solution.
Also, the notion of single-use plastic bag wasn’t well defined. The EU legislation clearly differentiates between the types of bags. The authors should have stipulated which of the bags will be banned in Moldova, said the expert.
Radu Jigau noted that the changes proposed to the Contravention Code are unclear as the author defines two methods of punishing legal entries, by fine, but describes different criteria for setting this, without clearly specifying the conditions. “I think the principles of the Contravention Code are violated in this case as this stipulates that the penalty must be clear and predictable,” he stated.
CAPC president Galina Bostan said that Moldova is suffocated by the plastic bags, but this law should be reviewed so that it could achieve its goal.
The analysis by the CAPC was carried out within the Vulnerability Expertise of the Draft Normative and Legal Acts Project that is supported financially by Matra Rule of Law and Good Governance Program of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
