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The Aarhus Convention (1998) organizes the exercise of public access to environmental information, taking part in decision making, and access to justice in environmental issues, as procedural safeguards of the right to a healthy and ecologically balanced environment. The effectivity of the right to environmental information bares significant limitations, both doctrinal and political, and has met several obstacles, mostly technical and cultural; such aspects concern especially the definition of environmental „information”, the conditions of accessing them, the exceptions, the administrative proceedings, the access to justice in this field and its results etc. In explaining its contents and amplifying the efficiency of this right a special part is played by the findings, conclusions and recommendations of the Compliance Committee for examining the enforcement of the Convention created in 2002 that can file complaints from Member States and non-governmental organizations, to evaluate, in a non-conflictual, non-judiciary and consultative manner, whether the treaty is correctly enforced by the Parties. Having no decision power, the Compliance Committee issues, following the examination, only a recommendation, addressed to the Reunion of Parties, that is always approved by the Member States. -
As a legal instrument of applying the principle of prevention, fundamental to environment law, preliminary authorizing polluting activities consists of an administrative act (permit) ruled by a special legal regime. It is based on assessing the environmental impact, it knows a special request, management and issuing procedure, and it establishes the conditions and/or parameters of functioning for an existing or new activity, having a potentially significant environmental impact. As an individual, real, regulatory act, the environmental authorization bears a complex version, in the shape of the integrated environmental authorization. -
This paper is a critical analysis of the new regulations concerning the punishment, from the perspective of their compliance with the principle of individualization. It discusses, by turns, the issue of the significance of the principle of individualization, of the reasons that justify the existence of some general criteria of individualization and of the questionable significance of the current general criteria of individualization, included in Article 74 of the new Criminal Code. -
In the above study the author reviews the terms of contentious appeal – according to various assumptions regulated by Law no. 554/2004 against the urban planning certificate, appraisals or agreements served for the issue of the building permit by relevant authorities in the field of environment protection and water management. Key words: urban planning certificate; appraisals/agreements for the issue of the building permit by relevant authorities in the field of environment protection and water management; legal requirements; applicable laws. -
Juvenile deprivation of liberty is a controversial issue, in particular because the measure is in opposition to the educative goal of juvenile justice. Detention of children is a more acute problem. In Switzerland, although pre-trial – as well as administrative (immigration law) – detention of children under the age of 15 are prohibited, they are inappropriately decided by courts and authorities. The article describes the situation, its legal frame and has a critical look at such practice and decisions. -
The problems of the land fund became of maximum importance after 1990. Romania, in relation to the new realities regarding the property, had to urgently adopt the Law No 18/1991. After more than 30 years of application, the Law on the land fund still gives rise to discussions on the topic of sharing the competence of the courts in matters of administrative acts issued in its application. The general framework in the matter of restitutions was completed by the appearance of the Law No 10/2001. Subsequently, the entry into force of the Law No 554/2004 has definitively established the legal regime of administrative acts in general. Therefore, we are at the confluence of several framework-laws in the field regarding the regime of administrative disputes, in general, and of the matter of the land fund, in particular. This study seeks to provide precisely an approach as analytical as possible of the manner the courts of law settle this issue. -
The new Romanian Code of Civil Procedure (Law no. 134/2010, as republished on 3 August 2012 and coming into force on the 1st of February 2013) supersedes the previous Code of Civil Procedure (of the year 1865) regulating (in articles 303-320) the witness-based evidence. In this study the author makes a wide-ranging analysis of this regulation, from the triple perspective of the admissibility, of the administration, of the appreciation of this mean of evidence, comparing the new provisions in this matter by those set forth in the previous Code of Civil Procedure. -
The motivated findings and conclusions of the expert or of the laboratory or specialized institute from which the expertise has been requested will be recorded in a written report. Exceptionally, when the expertise is carried out in front of the body that disposed/ordered its execution, the expertise report may be oral. The form of the expertise report also depends on the nature, as well as the specificity of the problem that generated the expertise. In all cases where the expertise requires time, documentations, travels, researches, analyses, laboratory tests, etc., the expertise report will take the written form. In case the expert can immediately express his opinion on the factual circumstance whose clarification requires specialized knowledge, he will be heard during the meeting, and his opinion will be recorded in a minutes, according to the provisions relative to the recording of the witness statement, which apply accordingly. As such, the expertise report is the document by which the expert informs the court of all the legally collected information which clarify (bring light on) the issues to be examined, being, therefore, the means by which the evidence is presented to the judge. The expert must limit himself to reporting what he has perceived, without expressing his opinion on the consequences of fact and of law that might result. The text of the report will include clear, short and dense phrases and sentences, using accessible vocabulary, without ambiguous formulations or terms and without references to proceedings outside the file. The technical terms, which are difficult to access, will be explained at the bottom of the page or in brackets, in order to facilitate the understanding of the conclusions.
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Expertise is the activity of research of certain facts or circumstances of the case, which requires specialized knowledge, activity carried out by an expert or, in the cases provided by law, by a specialist in a specific field, designated by the court at the request of the parties or ex officio, and whose findings and/or conclusions are reported in a written document, called an expertise report. As such, the expertise and the expertise report are two interdependent operations, since the expertise report is the follow-up of the expertise, its final act, and the expertise is the research activity on which the expertise report is based. Although the legislator establishes that the evidence can be provided, among others, by means of the „expertise” (Article 250, Articles 330–340 of the Civil Procedure Code), which constitutes the means of proof, from a legal point of view, is the expertise report, and not the expertise itself. The expertise can only concern factual circumstances on which the expert is asked to give clarifications or to ascertain them, circumstances which require specialized knowledge and which help to solve the case. The legal norms cannot form the object of the expertise, because the judges must know the law in force in Romania. However, the content of the foreign law is established by the court of law through „attestations obtained from the state bodies that have enacted it”, by „expertise opinion” or by another appropriate way [Article 2562 (1) of the Civil Code].
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In the study under the above title, the author analyzes the legal regime of movement of privately owned land through sales agreements, focusing mainly on registration and formal requirements for a period of approximately 200 years (the early nineteenth century until the present day) Interest in the study is evident in which there were not only significant differences in time but also in space, the legal regime differing essentially between the “Old Kingdom” (Oltenia, Muntenia, Moldova and Dobrogea) and “Transylvania” (Ardeal, Banat, Crisana, Satmar and Maramures) annexed to Romania in 1918. -
In the above study, the author, carrying out a critical analysis of articles 1216–1218 of the new Romanian Civil Code (Law no. 287/2009, which became effective on the 1st of October 2011), namely, regarding the contents regulating the violence (as a vice of consent) in this Code, considers that their wording is not adequate and that is why finally, the study, de lege ferenda proposes a new wording of the contents, such as formulated by the author. -
The Romanian State assumed by the New York Convention adopted on 10 June 1958 only the obligation to recognize and ensure the enforcement of foreign arbitral awards in the situation where the foreign arbitral award is pronounced on the territory of a signatory state of the Convention, and the dispute which has been settled by the respective foreign arbitral award may be qualified as being commercial by the national legislation. We appreciate that the Romanian State complied with this obligation by ratifying the New York Convention, by the Decree No 186/1961, and we emphasize, in this context, that the respective Convention is binding on the Romanian State only with regard to foreign arbitral awards that fall within its scope of application. Thus, for the foreign arbitral awards that do not fall within the scope of application of the New York Convention, the Romanian State is not bound by any conventional obligation, the state having the freedom to regulate legal provisions other than conventional ones regarding the recognition and enforcement of foreign arbitral awards. Consequently, the existence of some domestic legal provisions contained in the Civil Procedure Code, other than the provisions of the New York Convention, on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards, is in no way likely to engage international responsibility of the Romanian State, since, as we noted in this study, the Romanian State complied with its conventional obligations assumed by the conclusion of the New York Convention, even the provisions of the mentioned Convention (Article 7.1) allowing the existence of some national provisions other than conventional regulations, since only in such a hypothesis there is the possibility of invoking by the interested person the more favourable national provisions (if the normative provisions were identical, in no case could the problem of applying some more favourable legal provisions be raised).
