The Minister of Justice, Catalin Predoiu, issued an order on Friday regarding the formation of the Working Group – Criminal Policy of Romania 2024, which aims to develop and put into public debate the revised versions of the new Criminal Codes and the basic special criminal legislation and, subsequently, the referral to the Parliament until December 31, 2024 at the latest.
In a press release to Agerpres on Friday, the ministry emphasizes that these normative acts have undergone hundreds of changes, both in the Parliament and as a result of the transposition of some decisions of the Constitutional Court, a fact that in some places affected the coherence of the initial regulations.
In the opinion of the Ministry of Justice, this legislative fluctuation, which was sometimes incoherent, inevitably affected the efficiency of the Prosecutor’s Office, the Police and the unitary character of the jurisprudence, often leading to different solutions in similar cases, including a potential non-unitary application of the criminal law and vulnerabilities in terms of compliance with ECHR jurisprudence.
“The criminal policy of the state is at a crossroads. Since the adoption of the new Criminal Codes, hundreds of interventions have been made on the initial projects, from the stage of parliamentary debates and until now, the criminological phenomenon has evolved, the challenges to which it must respond law enforcement institutions have diversified. A concerted, structured and integrated effort of cooperation between the Executive, the Legislature, the judiciary, the legal professions, academia and civil society must be launched to evaluate the legislative status quo, the jurisprudence the Romanian courts, CCR, CJEU and ECHR, the legislative proposals in the Parliament, the criminological phenomenon, its dynamics and trends, the present and future needs of the judicial system and the final beneficiaries – the citizens and the Romanian society as a whole,” the communication reads.
According to the ministry, this approach will implicitly fall within a welcome and necessary broader process of normative simplification and clarification on the scale of the entire Romanian legal system.
