Autor: Mihai DUNEA
Publicat în: Journal Of Eastern European Criminal Law no. 2/2019
Revistă disponibilă: aici.
Abstract: In the last period of time previous to the moment of elaborating this article (from around 2017 to 2019), the Romanian legislator (either the primary one: the Parliament, or the delegate one: the Government) manifested an intense and constant preoccupation regarding the modification of the current (and still relatively new) Criminal Code, and in general, of changing different parts of the criminal legislation dating from 2009 (year of conception and official publication), but who went into force only in 2014 (on the 1st of February). This political will often went into conflict with the general view of justice projected by some representatives of the civil society and by some of the most important professions in the juridical field of occupation (e.g.: the judges and the prosecutors), giving rise to extended media coverage, endless discussions, (sometimes) street manifestations and even some quasi-riot like phenomenon in several cities and towns in Romania (and especially in the capital of the country), polarizing most of the society and maintaining a general state of pressure. The interesting outcome (namely, that none of the most important modifications proposed and/or adopted by the legislator, in this period, didn’t actually went into force, most of them being rejected by the Constitutional Court of Romania), is only surpassed by the peculiarity of inconsistency of the new proposals that now occur, in comparison with the former one’s (the red thread being that the legislator seems to be set on changing at least some parts of the current criminal legislation, though it is still a new legislation). In this article, the author will present and critically comment some of this new tendencies revealed in the last period by the current criminal law legislature of Romania, in order to diagnose the trends of criminal law evolution (or involution) that currently occur in the Romanian legislative landscape, the focus being set onto the general aspects of criminal law that the legislature proposed to change (taking into consideration, among others, the scientific specialization of the author in the general of the criminal law).
Keywords: Romanian Criminal Code; Romanian Constitutional Court; constitutionality; Emergency Ordinance.
