To effectively fight corruption, the citizens should be active and should denounce the acts of corruption to the competent bodies, namely the Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office, advised lawyer Veaceslav Țurcan.
The lawyer said live that if a person is told to give bribe, this should go to the prosecutor, ask for marked banknotes and take these to the one who asked bribe so that the offender is held accountable.
The recommendation of the lawyer came after Nistru war veteran Nicolae Besedovschi, in a news conference at IPN, complained that for 15 years he has been unable to recover his car that remained stuck at a customs post. In April 2005, when he was bringing the vehicle from the European Union, Moldovan customs officers asked money from him for allowing him to take the car into Moldova, but he refused to give bribe. In time, he went to many courts and other state institutions to be done justice, but all in vain.
According to Veaceslav Țurcan, in the case of the veteran there are a number of questions as to the observance of time limits and provisions of the Civil Procedure Code. “You can be 100% right, but you will ultimately lose the case for the simple reason that you didn’t organize the defense correctly and didn’t respect the timeframes,” explained the lawyer.
Veaceslav Țurcan recommended Nicolae Besedovschi to ask for state guaranteed legal assistance if his family cannot afford a lawyer. The protests not always help. Correct procedures are needed, which is correct organization of things from legal viewpoint: preparation of documents, collection of evidence by obeying the provisions of the Civil Procedure Code. If justice is not done in the national courts of law, the case can be prepared for being sent to the European Court of Human Rights.
The news conference titled “Corruption at the Customs Service supported by the Government of the Republic of Moldova and protected by the judicial system during 15 years” forms part of the series of conferences held in the framework of IPN’s project “Injustice Revealed through Multimedia”. The project’s partner is the Lawyers Union of Moldova. IPN Agency does not assume the right to decide if the organizers of news conferences are right in the cases about which they will speak as this is the exclusive prerogative of justice, but the exaggeratedly long examination period of these cases, which is much longer than the law allows, can be considered an act of evident unfairness and injustice. IPN News Agency does not bear responsibility for the public statements made in the public sphere by the organizers of news conferences.