As long as the amendments to the Criminal Code can be interpreted broadly, concerns will persist, lawyer Vadim Vieru stated in a public debate titled “Treason of in legislation and in life”. He criticized the government for not organizing more public consultations before passing the amendments to the Criminal Code article “Treason”. According to the lawyer, it is doubted that the employees of state institutions will be able to apply the new norm concerning treason.
Vadim Vieru noted that the amendment to the Criminal Code article regarding treason aroused concern among representatives of civil society. The legal norm can be interpreted broadly and this limits the chances of a case reaching the court.
“When we talk about the amendment of the Criminal Code and when it comes to terms that can be interpreted broadly, there will be concerns. I don’t think that the reference to the law on state security, in the way in which hostile activity is defined, is sufficient. It is a term that can be interpreted excessively broadly. In theory, everything is fine, but in practice it is different. We have state institutions, such as the Security and Intelligence Service, PCCOCS, where employees are not sufficiently trained to investigate such actions. In such institutions, there are people about whom I can say that they are not well-intentioned. In the Gorgan case, for example, there is the presumption of innocence, but still the person was Chief of the General Staff. PCCOCS announced that it started a criminal case. But in the Gorgan case, I don’t know if there will be a conviction sentence and if the case will generally end up in court. In PCCOCS and SIS, we do not have trained people who know how to apply the norm. And when you present them with a norm that is interpreted extensively, it becomes a contradictory process,” said the lawyer.
Vadim Vieru criticized the government for not organizing several rounds of public consultations before adopting amendments to the Criminal Code.
“It’s not good that they forget to hold consultations. Maybe more ideas will be generated through consultations. We are a young state. We do not have the practice of protecting national security. It is yet to be formed. But when we have to form it, it must be formed appropriately. By creating practices by which not convictions, but acquittals are ordered by court, we destroy the concept of national security. Public consultations are an exercise that should have been carried out. If public consultations had been held, maybe proposals would have come more actively on this segment because we have specialists in national security in Moldova,” stated Vadim Vieru.
He noted that PCCOCS, the institution responsible for putting the law into practice, does not have enough capacities to send a well-documented case to court.
“The most serious problem is related to the capacity of the law enforcement institutions to apply the norm, how prepared and capable they are to apply the law. Knowing as a lawyer what institutions we have, I’m afraid that we will not have sufficient capacities for this norm to be applied by the book, for a well-formulated indictment to be sent to court,” explained the lawyer.
The public debate entitled “Treason in legislation and in life” was the 308th installment of the project “Developing Political Culture through Public Debates”, which is implemented by IPN News Agency with the support of the Hanns Seidel Foundation of Germany.
