The Decision No 641/2014 of the Constitutional Court has radically changed the preliminary chamber procedure, transforming it into a procedure much closer to which it must be, in the opinion of the European Court of Human Rights, a criminal procedure conducted before a judge, even if it does not end in the ruling on the merits of the criminal charge, but it solves aspects of a particular importance on the merits concerned. The change has consisted in the overturning of the characters initially imagined by the legislator, overturning that has transformed the preliminary chamber procedure from a procedure conducted without the participation of the prosecutor, of the parties and of the injured party, with a limited contradictoriality between the prosecutor and the defendant and predominantly written, into a procedure involving the participation of the processual actors, completely contradictory and oral, in which it becomes possible to provide evidence on the main object of this processual phase (the legality of the evidence provided in the criminal prosecution phase and the legality of carrying out the acts by the criminal prosecution bodies). Unfortunately, the latest changes brought to the preliminary chamber by the adoption of the Law No 75/2016, although they represent a step forward in the attempt to make this criminal processual phase to comply with the elements of a fair procedure, do not follow precisely the spirit of the decision of unconstitutionality, as the legislator has still left question marks about the fairness of the procedure as regards the hypothesis that there have not been filed applications and/or pleas and as regards the limitation of the means of evidence.

To say that man is the supreme value of a democratic society and of the state of law is a partly true statement. This is because it is known that, in the long period in which the principles of the constitutional democracy and of the state of law have been affirmed in the social practice, no human society succeeded in fully providing the individual with the full extent of its political, social, economic, cultural or religious value. Even in the states considered, without reservations, to be democratic there have been and still are threats to the physical and mental integrity of the individual from some state authorities and even indifference for the individual’s life. In fact, this actually explains that the constitutional utterances according to which „the right to life is guaranteed”, „the dignity and the personality of the individual are supreme values”. The existence of a rule of law and, more so, of a rule of constitutional rank, which affirms and enshrines in normative models the importance of man as supreme value of a socio-political community, proves that the compliance with this value still remains a standard, a requirement imposed on everybody as model of social behaviour.

In this paper the author has proceeded to a brief examination of the European normative act adopted in March 2016, which regulates the presumption of innocence and the right to be present at the trial within the criminal procedures, both rights being circumscribed to the right to a fair trial provided in Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. The study also makes a comparative examination which has in view how these rights of the suspect or of the accused are protected in the Romanian law, also expressing some critical opinions as concerns the European normative act. The elements of novelty consist in the examination made, as well as in the comparative analysis and the critical opinions expressed.