Students of “Gh. Asachi” who are penal charged for breaking the entitling from institution’s frontispiece might win at the ECHR

Those 4 students of “Gheorghe Asachi” Lyceum, to whom penal proceedings were instituted for breaking the word “Moldovan” from the institution’s frontispiece might come off victorious at the European Court for Human Rights in Strasbourg, in case the national courts will sanction them on penal or administrative grounds, the lawyer Vitalie Nagacevschi states, the chairman of the Organization “Jurists for human rights”. At a radio broadcast at “Antena C” station, Nagacevschi declared that the actions of those students are correct, and a possible sanctioning by the courts of the Republic of Moldova “opens them the door towards ECHR”, were they will come off victorious for sure. “Their actions can not be qualified as hooliganism, because taking into consideration the modality of determining the actions those 4 students commited, we must ask at first what was their purpose. And their purpose was to plead against changing the entitling of “Gheorghe Asachi” from Romanian-French into Moldovan-French. In this way, the youngsters expressed their constitutional right of freedom of expression, without aiming at disturbing public order”, Nagacevschi states. At the press conference that took place last week, the chairman of the ad-hoc delegation of the European Parliament within the Committee for Parliamentary Cooperation Republic of Moldova-European Union, Mariane Mikklo declared that the Committee tackled during the discussions with several representatives of the Moldovan Government this case and according to her, “the proceedings were instituted too easy”. At the same press-conference, the communist MP Victor Stepaniuc, said that the penal investigations are “an obsolete action”, mentioning that he discussed with the Minister of Internal Affairs, Gheorghe Papuc, who informed him that only administrative proceedings were instituted regarding those 4 students. On May 4, about 300 students of “Gheorghe Asachi” protested against changing the entitling of the lyceum from “Romanian-French” into “Moldovan-French”. 4 students broke the glass plate with the inscription “Moldovan” from the frontispiece of the institution and replaced it with a paper with the inscription “Romanian”. On the second day, penal proceedings were instituted against those four students for “group hooliganism”.