In its capacity of party to the (European) Convention on Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and its Additional Protocols, inter alia, Romania has committed to comply with Art. 6 of the mentioned international instrument as well as with art. 2 of the Additional Protocol no. 7. For this reason, it is imperative that documents which have important procedural consequences and emanating from a body which is part of the executive power, to be susceptible of a fair and adversarial control from a judge, meeting the fairness guarantees consistent with the rule of law – this is, in fact, the ratio legis of art. 2781 of the Criminal Procedure Code. Equally, according to art. 2 of the Additional Protocol no. 7 to this Convention, any person convicted of an offense within the autonomous meaning of this term, has the right to submit the “declaration of guilt” concerned to the analysis of a higher court, benefiting from the double degree of jurisdiction in criminal matters. This study aims to analyze the compliance of the referred supranational provisions with the provisions of positive domestic law.

In this study, the author shows that, if a person violates the precept of criminal legal norms, he or she will be liable to prosecution for embracement of that behavior. Criminal responsibility includes offender’s obligation to abide and to serve his or her sentence, and also the State’s correlative right to impose such a sanction as a result of an offense and to impose upon the offender the execution of that sanction. In modern criminal law, criminal liability can be incurred only as a result of an offense and only if the offender has the ability to be held criminally responsible. Classical school of criminal law has converted the subjective criminal liability based on guilt into a principle: without guilt there is no crime, and without crime there is no criminal liability. Such being, the author raises the following question: how might we reconcile these assertions with the objective criminal liability issue which incurs only based on the causality relation between the offense and the result, irrespective of the mental position of the perpetrator? This study represents a journey onto a “hag” of the criminal law in which the foundation of objective criminal liability is addressed through the common-law doctrine, also assessing the pros and cons of maintaining such an institution in some Continental Law systems that accept it. Furthermore, the author has tried sketching a picture of the institution of objective criminal liability in terms of comparative law (English and Italian criminal law), indicating the objective criminal responsibility forms as they were identified by different common-law authors. Last but not least, she aimed to identify the residual forms of the objective criminal liability under the Romanian criminal law, and the prospect of maintaining this form of criminal liability in the Continental Criminal Law.

The authors of this study bring into question issues arising from the adoption of the new codes, the Civil Code and that of Civil Procedure, and analyze practical aspects relating to the laws implementing the two new codes impact on the related acts thereof. Adopting the new codes, in addition to establishing provisions to meet current requirements, has also generated numerous legislative interventions on the related legal acts. To facilitate tracking legal information, republication of these related acts was provided for, operation which, most often created many problems regarding proper preparation of the re-publishable forms of the concerned acts. Furthermore, the authors also present statistics about the number of normative acts needed to be republished under the new codes and the concrete way to fulfill this task, specifying both the acts in respect of which the re-publishable forms have been formally drawn, and those in respect of which this obligation has been fulfilled by republishing thereof in the Official Gazette.