Emerency ordinances on pardons may wait, Romania’s CSM says
Romania’s Superior Council of Magistrature (CSM) rejected on Wednesday an attempt of the newly elected goverment to issue emergency ordinances which would not require the approval of parliament or the president. Such ordinances were part of the country’s government plan to pardon thousands of prisoners and change the existing Penal Code. The CSM saw the move as unjustified. However, the CSM ruling is not binding.
„There is no emergency in debating such projects through parliament. And more, such acts could weaken Romania’s efforts to fight corruption. Such efforts would be badly afected, unfortunately”, General Prosecutor Augustin Lazăr said in a statement. Cristina Tarcea, head of Romania’s High Court of Cassation and Justice (ICCJ), shared the opinion while the country’s President Klaus Iohannis called for a popular referendum on the issue.
SRI to issue a professional ethics code
Romania’s National Intelligence Service (SRI0 will issue a professional ethics code for its agents, and the document will appear ihn te Official Gazette in a few days”, SRI chief Eduard Hellvig told reporters on Wednesday. The move comes after hearings before parliamentary committees in the field amid allegations of SRI interference in the country’s politics. After a seven-hour hearing in parliament, Mr Hellvig called the attacks against his institution as unprecedented while pointing out the SRI was never involved in street protests and other power games. Thousands rallied in Bucharest and other cities across the country on Sunday to protest against a government plan to decriminalise some offences and pardon thousands of convicted prisoners through emergency ordinances that critics say threaten to undermine the crackdown on high-level graft.
Police raids in Bucharest and other Romanian counties
Police raids were reported early on Thursday in the capital Bucharest and other Romanian counties such as Botoşani, in northern Romania, Giurgiu and Dolj, in the south, and the north-western counties of Sălaj and Timiş. The people under investigation are suspected of setting a criminal gang of human trafficking from Turkey through Romania to Hungary. Some 100 people were subject to human trafficking in their attepts to reach Germany. Early last December, police in the western county of Arad discovered more than 40 people, including 18 children, hidden in a tank on their way to the West.
Romania’s so-called Székely Land under renewed debate
Ten Romanian Hungarians put forward a draft-law concerning the autonomy of a region known as the Székely Land in central Romania. The initiative was published in the Official Gazette on Thursday along with the negative response of the the country’s Legislative Council. Some 100,000 signatures from at least ten counties are needed to push the document through parliament for debate. According to the project, the Székely Land is expected to include the counties of Covasna, Harghita, and parts of the Mureş county.
The head of the Initiative Committee is Arus Zsolt István, resident of Gheorghieni (Harghita county). It’s an „obsession” of those supporting such „policies based on ethnic principles with no chance to succeed”, former Romanian Foreign Minister Titu Corlăţean told reporters on Thursday.
Alexandru Danga
