The bill to amend and supplement the Penal Procedure Code, drafted by the Ministry of Justice, must be withdrawn from Parliament for being conceptually reviewed, considers the Center for the Analysis and Prevention of Corruption (CAPC) that appraised the draft law. The bill provides for the transfer of the power to restart prosecution from the hierarchically superior prosecutor to the judge of inquiry, but this is not a solution, according to CAPC experts.
In a news conference at IPN, CAPC expert Natalia Rosca noted that this bill causes a conflict of interests. The judge who orders the resumption of prosecution - the judge of inquiry - will have to later examine prosecutors’ actions within the prosecution initiated by him and this is not recommended.
According to the expert, the adoption of this bill will increase the workload of the investigating judge. “We know that the heavy workload is one of the problems invoked by the judiciary and I think the solution of the Ministry of Justice is not justified from this perspective,” said Natalia Rosca.
She also said that the decisional transparency requirements weren’t respected when drafting the bill, while the informative note to the draft law does not meet the norms stipulated by the Law on Legal Acts.
Natalia Rosca noted that the bill to amend the Penal Procedure Code runs counter to the Constitution of the Republic of Moldova and international instruments in the field. “No international instrument transfers the right to begin, continue or resume legal proceedings to the judge of inquiry, if only as a decision when checking the legality of the prosecutor’s actions, as it is provided now by the law,” she stated.
The expert considers the author drafted the bill to amend the Penal Procedure Code in order to execute a Constitutional Court judgment, but this refers to the reasons for resuming the prosecution, not to the competent person. So, the bill does not provide solutions to the problem highlighted by the Court.
The CAPC appraisal was carried out within the Vulnerability Expertise of Draft Normative and Legal Acts Project that is supported by the Embassy of the Netherlands in Bucharest.
