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Romania's General Prosecutor Augustin Lazar stated on Wednesday that the monitoring of Romania within the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism (CVM) must be maintained, because this proves to be "a safety helmet" in unforeseeable situations, referring to the recent proposals to amend the Criminal Codes.
"Monitoring proves to be a safety helmet when you go on site, for unforeseeable situations. And after 10 years, here it happens something that we would not expect: radical changes of some law texts. (...) We wish to have irreversible evolutions. We do not wish legislation changes which will practically disarm the magistrates of the anti-corruption justice tools, because the decriminalization of some law texts regarding the work misdemeanors would turn inoperable the impunity of whistleblowers, institutions which where introduced in this phase of integration in the European Union, and which resisted 10 years and even more in the Romanian legislation. They should remain and not be given up, because otherwise magistrates will be disarmed in front of corruption offenses," Augustin Lazar stated for Agerpres.
The General Prosecutor underlined that the CVM reports of the European Commission, in the period 2014 - 2016, have underscored a positive trend, but they mention that the attacks of mass-media and politicians against magistrates represent a serious threat. "It is worth mentioning that Romania registered major progresses in the direction of achieving the objectives of reference comprised in the CVM, but the Report states the fact that the strong attacks directed against magistrates and the judiciary system by the mass-media and politicians represent a serious threat to the irreversibility of anti-corruption fight. This is exactly what the magistrates are discussing these days. The Report also states that the anti-corruption legislation must apply to all equally and at all the levels. This is very important, because the changes of legislation, in the sense in which they are meant to clearly weaken and reduce the enforcement area of texts regarding the corruption offenses, and which represented a major challenge to the DNA's [National Anticorruption Directorate] independence and efficacy, would entail the revaluation of the achieved progressed," Lazar said.
The General Prosecutor stated that he disagrees with changing the text in the Criminal Code on the conflict of interest offense. "Another important matter is preventing the conflict of interests, fraud and corruption in the procedures of public acquisitions, which continues to remain a serious challenge. Nowadays we note that precisely through one of the Emergency Ordinance draft it is planned to change the text on this offense of conflict of interest, so that it would be then inoperable, which is not to be wished. Surely the text must be brought to the exigency level of the decisions of the Constitutional Court, by changing the phrase 'commercial relations' to 'relation between professionals," Augustin Lazar also stated.
