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The article deals with the legal regime of the convict’s money, their sources of origin and the destinations for their use during detention, in the Romanian criminal law and jurisprudence, bringing to light some proposals aimed at improving the situation of some categories of detainees in a state of economic precariousness. The objectives of the article are to determine the content of the notion of convict’s money in the current Romanian legislation, their sources of origin and the destinations for their use during detention, as well as to determine whether the current Romanian legislation complies with the requirements of the international instruments and whether the chosen legislative solutions are similar to those in other European states. The results show that the notion of prisoner’s money should include the money due to the convicted for the work done in prison, the sums received from natural or legal persons during detention and the amounts found upon them at the arrival in the penitentiary. It can be concluded that the amounts of money shown in the nominal account can be used for extinguishing the civil obligations established by the criminal conviction decision, without violating the rights of the detainees to receive, buy and possess goods, the right to telephone conversations, the right to petition and correspondence, the right to food, personal hygiene, the right to photocopy documents from the individual file and the right to medical treatment. The results also show that the present Romanian legislation regarding prisoner’s money complies with the international rules, such as the „Nelson Mandela Rules”, the U.N. Convention against torture adopted in 1984, ECHR/the Convention or the European Penitentiary Rules REC (2006)2, and it is similar to the legislation of other European states, such as France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany or Austria, regarding the sources from which this money may be legally obtained, and the destinations for which this money may be used. In the case of those detainees who do not obtain income from work, it may be beneficial for a regulation to provide, within a reasonable limit, an exemption from the attachment of their money. For all inmates who do not have income, provisions should be made for the prison administration to bear, within a reasonable degree, the cost of national telephone calls made by convicts in order to keep in touch with their family. The implications are to clarify the issues discussed, facilitating a unitary practice, supported by solutions in the jurisprudence. -
According to the provisions of Article 260 paragraph 2 of the Criminal Code of 1968 [Article 273 (3) of the Criminal Code], both the „active” false testimony (the situation in which the witness gives false statements) and the „passive” false testimony (in which case the witness does not say everything he knows about essential circumstances he was asked) may be withdrawn, with the mention that, in the latter case, the witness must provide full and real details, which he perceived directly, which were essential and of which he was asked. In order to constitute a cause of non-punishment, the withdrawal of the false testimony must be carried out in the case in which it was given, and not in the case in which the criminal prosecution is conducted or in which the offence of false testimony is examined.
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The article reviews the main features of digitization and its implications in the economic and social field. The technological perturbations on the economy, people’s conduct, medicine, law, psychology and education are significant. The author proposes the establishment of a National technical-legal laboratory, besides a faculty of law, and of a scientific event, entitled „Law and Digitization – Improving Legal Services”, to help improve access to justice in a digitized world.
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The object of the general part of criminal law and its relation to the special part are still uncertain, and this is because the criminal doctrine has always neglected the general criminal norms, by focusing its attention on the norms of incrimination, which are specific to the special part. In relation to these matters, the doctrine often makes contradictory statements and, as a result, some authors have deducted that the connection between the general part and the special part of criminal law is that of a general law (common law) and a special law (exceptional law), so that a possible conflict between a general criminal norm and a special criminal norm is solved according to the rule specialia generalibus derogant. And, unfortunately, such an opinion tends to become dominant, as evidenced by the fact that the criminal legislator disregards more and more frequently the norms with value of principles of branch, which are included in the general part of the Criminal Code. Therefore, in order to combat this completely unacceptable legislative practice, the author of this paper has intended to point out that the general part is a framework-law, with a higher legal value, while the special part is a (derived) subordinate law, which can only specify (clarify) the norms of the general part, but can never derogate from them. However, starting from this premise, the author has noticed that the persisting doubt about the relation between the two parties also has a deeper cause, which resides in the fact that no modern legislator has been preoccupied with determining and explicitly providing the general conditions and rules of punishment. Although the criminal doctrine has, for a long time, noticed that the norms of incrimination lay down special rules of punishment, the scope of which is limited to a specific, well-determined offence, however, in the absence of general rules of punishment, it has concluded wrongly, that the incrimination norms are autonomous independent norms, while general criminal norms are derived (secondary) norms.
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The present study analyzes the working hypotheses in the matter of the preliminary procedure regarding claims from European funds. The study identifies a number of working scenarios, starting from the particular way in which these claims arise, specific to European funding mechanisms. Another filter in the analysis is given by an irregularity in the management of funding, an irregularity that is treated differently as it appears before or after the payment, taking into account the variable, if it generates a debt to be recovered from the European Union budget/international public donors and/or national public funds related to them through an undue payment. Thus, the study observes a series of nuances in the hypothesis of undue payments, similar shades of contentious type to tax procedures1.
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New technologies, such as wireless communications, generate unique threats to human health and to the quality of the environment. Among them, electromagnetic fields (EMF) – of the relay antennas or power lines – represent a colourless, odourless and invisible pollution with adverse sanitary effects. As the technologies of the field are rapidly evolving, even before their negative consequences can be sufficiently researched and proven by science, they create difficulties for the ability of the right to adapt and respond appropriately to the new problems thus raised. Among the first legal reactions in the matter are those registered as regards the human rights, especially ECHR case law, which assimilates the EMF threats in the context of Article 8 of the Convention, involves the precautionary principle and imposes the notion of gravity threshold. The Case Calancea and others v. The Republic of Moldova (2018) represents an important moment in the opening of the Strasbourg court to the new problems of EMF and, despite the reluctance manifested by means of the judgment delivered, this implies a recognition of the existence and of the need for legal assimilation of new threats to human rights and the jurisprudential consolidation, in this context, of the right to a healthy environment.
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Curtea Constituțională a pronunțat recent o decizie asupra constituționalității art. III, pct. a) și b) din Ordonanța de urgență a Guvernului nr. 70/2016 pentru modificarea și completarea Codului de procedură penală și a Legii nr. 304/2004 privind organizarea judiciară, admițând excepția în privința pct. b), cu opinie separată. Anterior și în mod similar, Curtea a pronunțat o decizie de admitere a neconstituționalității art. 27 din Codul de procedură civilă astfel cum fusese el interpretat de Înalta Curte de Casație și Justiție – Completul pentru dezlegarea unor chestiuni de drept1. Considerăm că ambele soluții ale Curții ridică probleme legate de efectele în timp ale unor decizii ale sale pronunțate anterior în aceeași privință, probleme la care, de altfel, face referire și opinia separată publicată la prima menționată, deși nu suntem întru totul de acord cu aceasta din urmă.
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The recent Administrative Code (approved by the Government Emergency Ordinance No 57/2019) has taken over from the old regulation (the Law on local public administration No 215/2001), with some amendments, the rules regarding the function of public administrator at the level of communes, cities, municipalities, counties and associations of inter-community development. In this article, the author mainly considers the appointment of the public administrator by the mayor, the delegation of his attributions, including that of the main loan officer. Special attention is paid to the management contract (its object, the rights and obligations of the contracting parties, its duration and its cessation). Regarding the legal nature of the respective contract, the author’s opinion is that this is an administrative contract, of public law. Among the arguments considered the following are included: it is regulated by the Administrative Code; one of the parties is a public authority; its object consists in „coordinating some compartments of the specialized apparatus or of the public services”; it can be terminated (unilaterally) by the public authority. The end of the article is devoted to the triptych at the level of communes, cities and municipality, triptych consisting of the mayor, the deputy mayor and the public administrator. The idea is that the delegation of some of the attributions to the public administrator does not remove the competence of the mayor to exercise any attributions given by law in his competence.
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This paper aims to analyse the interconnectivity between the will of the donor and the general validity requirements for donations in the Romanian civil law. As part of the continental tradition of civil law, the 2009 Civil Code of Romania maintains the will theory at the forefront of its contract law. Within this framework, the legal concept of will encompasses the mental process of volition, during which the individual reflects and arrives at a decision, and the utterance of said decision. As a result, the notion of free will forms the foundation of contractual freedom. Through its gratuitous nature, a donation is both a contract and an act of liberality. As such, the legislator’s reluctance in the field of liberalities has influenced how the general requirements of validity were ultimately shaped. Liberalities are demarcated, from the volitional point of view, by the liberal intent of the donor, and from the economic standpoint, by the reduction of the donor’s patrimony. This impoverishment of the donor is the source of the legislator’s reluctance. Thus, our effort sets out to trace the influence of the liberal intent upon the general validity requirements of a donation contract. For this purpose, the present paper is divided into four main sections, corresponding to said requirements: cause, consent, capacity and object. While cause and consent derive naturally from the will theory, capacity and object were also subordinated to the liberal intent of the donor. As such, the common incapacity was entwined with a special variant which absolutely presumes the suggestion or captation of the donor’s mind. In regard to the object, the donor cannot dispose of the good belonging to another, unlike in the case of a sale contract.
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The direct action in the guarantee for hidden vices is still a new subject in the legal doctrine and especially in the Romanian judicial practice. At present, judicial practice has not committed such an action, although the issue has been debated, both in the doctrine of the old Civil Code, and especially in the doctrine of the new Civil Code. What is even more surprising is that the legislator understood to directly regulate such direct action in the case of the guarantee for eviction, without regulating it in the case of the cover for hidden vices. If technical and legal issues seem relatively simple in the case of direct action for hidden vices against a previous vendor or first seller, things get complicated when it comes to direct action in hidden vices against the contractor. The present study aims to identify the legal nature and the basis of the direct action in the guarantee for hidden vices against the contractor, thus establishing its admissibility criteria. By the arguments that we will render, we hope to contribute to the shaping of some defining elements of direct action that will facilitate its practical application.
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The present study aims to give an answer to the legal framework regarding the possible staff reduction followed by dismissal, measures that would have as sole purpose to increase the profit of the employer. Against the background of the ambiguity of Article 65 of the Labour Code, it is considered that such a measure is rationally possible only if the employer has a profit that is below the level of the average profit existing in the sector/field of activity (a situation that can be evaluated in relation to the financial data from the Trade Register Office and with the data that is published periodically by the Ministry of Public Finance). Only in such a case the condition of the real and serious cause is met.
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The verification of scripts is an incident in relation to the literal evidence, more precisely a procedure to which it is subjected a contested written document under private signature. The contested written documents under private signature may be subjected to a verification procedure either by principal way, by a preventive action, having exclusively such an object, or by incidental way, during a trial. The verification of the written document under private signature, by principal way, is admissible, under the conditions of Articles 359–363 of the Civil Procedure Code, if there was not or there is not a trial pending in which that written document had been opposed or is being opposed. Instead, the verification of the written document under private signature, by incidental way, is regulated in Articles 301–303 of the Civil Procedure Code, whose provisions are the object of this study. Article 301 of the Civil Procedure Code regulates the attitude that must be manifested by the person to whom such a written document under private signature is opposed, given that such a written document has no evidentiary power unless it is expressly or tacitly acknowledged or if it is declared as being truthful after being verified by the court.
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The judicial administrator will submit a monthly report containing the description of how he has performed his duties, an account of the expenses incurred with the administration of the procedure or of other expenses made from the funds existing in the debtor’s estate, as well as, if necessary, the stage of performing the inventory. The report will also mention the fee received by the judicial administrator, by specifying modality of calculation thereof. The report will be submitted to the case file and an extract shall be published in the BIP. Every 120 days, the syndic-judge will analyze and rule on the stage of continuation of the procedure, through a resolution by which he will be able to establish certain measures as duty of the judicial administrator and he will grant an administrative term of control or of trial, as the case may be. In the event that there are contentious or non-contentious applications, as well as in the hypothesis in which the syndic-judge deems it necessary, he will order the urgent summoning of the interested persons and of the judicial administrator, for the purpose of solving the applications or for ordering the necessary measures.
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The generation of public procurement directives1 adopted in 2014 supplemented the number of exclusion grounds from the contract award procedure, adding, inter alia, the hypothesis from Article 57 (4) (d): „where the contracting authority has sufficiently plausible indications to conclude2 that the economic operator has entered into agreements with other economic operators aimed at distorting competition”. The respective exclusion ground has been regulated in the public procurement directives as an optional ground, being however provided for the Member States the possibility to transpose it into national laws as a compulsory ground. This regulatory modality, which inexplicably restricts the scope of incidence only at the conclusion of agreements, although competition can be affected by other methods, and which allows different transpositions by the Member States, has led many doctrinaires to react critically to the prospect that such an important exclusion ground generate a relatively narrow and non-unitary practice at Union level.
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The article proposes a sensitive topic in the Romanian criminal procedure, namely to determine the extent to which the cases of absolute nullity are limitatively provided by the Criminal Procedure Code (Article 281 of the Criminal Procedure Code) or whether there are cases of nullity of the processual or procedural documents which, although not included in the enumeration of Article 281 of the Criminal Procedure Code, are, however, veritable cases of absolute nullity. The problem is all the more delicate since the national doctrine is situated, up to this moment, in the comfort zone in which the cases of absolute nullity are equated to those of express nullity and those of relative nullity to those of virtual nullity. I have shown, with examples from the practice, but also from the doctrine (too timid so far), that there are situations of virtual absolute nullity of the criminal processual acts not even listed in the content of Article 281 of the Criminal Procedure Code, as well as the situations in which they may become incidental.
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The need to analyze the condition of guilt in engaging the legal liability of the physician does not result only from the ECHR Judgment in Ioniță Case, which ruled that the physician’s liability itself is based on the notion of medical negligence, but especially because of its specific aspects. According to recent practice, the intensity of medical guilt in the degree of culpa levissima is able to lead to de facto exoneration from criminal liability (through a symbolic sanction) in order to focus on repairing the victim’s prejudice. The consequence of changing the vision on the medical legal liability from a punitive-criminal liability of the physician to a reparative liability facilitates the perception of the French conception of the contractual liability of the health unit. This does not remove the personal liability of the employed physician, but limits it to a psychic attitude of elusion of the system of cooperation and control of the health unit, which brings it closer to the indirect intention. Hence the need to distinguish between indirect intention and guilt with forethought (recklessness), which in its turn is different from guilt without forethought (negligence).
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The article presents the constitutional landmarks which justify the sanction of the absolute nullity of the violation of the provisions referring to the material competence and competence according to the person’s quality of the criminal investigation body and analyzes this nullity from the perspective of the processual and procedural documents that establish the sanction, which has the effect of resumption of the criminal prosecution by the competent body or the exclusion of some processual documents or probative procedures.
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În lipsa unui probatoriu care să demonstreze existența unei activități autonome a inculpaților de inițiere, respectiv constituire a unei grupări infracționale, activitate care să rămână distinctă de comiterea infracțiunii ce a constituit scopul acesteia și care să vizeze organizarea acțiunilor infracționale, prin fixarea modalității și a coordonatelor de săvârșire a acestora, precum și a sarcinilor și rolului fiecărui membru în cadrul grupării constituite, fapta capătă valențele juridice ale pluralității ocazionale, prevăzute de articolul 77 lit. a) C.pen.
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The climate dispute, developed explosively in the last decade, has had a first experience also at the level of EU law through People’s Climate Case (2018) in which 10 families and a civic association have brought an action before the EU Tribunal against the European Parliament and the European Commission for the insufficiency of the objectives assumed in the matter of climate changes. It was required the cancellation of several European Union legislative texts in the clime package and a compensation for the prejudice claimed to be incurred in this context. By the Ordinance of 8 May 2019, the action was dismissed as inadmissible, as the conditions of Article 263 (4) TFEU were not met, whereas there had been challenged legislative texts which did not concern and did not affect the applicants individually. The case law thus created leads to conclusions notable for the climate justice.
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The question of whether criminal liability can be engaged only in the case of the violation of a subjective right or whether it operates also when a simple legitimate interest is violated, without being enshrined as a subjective right, has always preoccupied the doctrine of civil law. The discussions were amplified on the background of the evolution of the law of the criminal civil liability, from a law oriented towards the sanctioning of the guilty perpetrator, to an indemnity law, increasingly inclined towards the interests of the victim who suffers from the unjust harming of his subjective rights, but also of the legitimate interests, those which, without being consecrated, cannot be tolerated by the legal order. The debate has become increasingly animated, in the context of the proliferation of claims that aspire to compensation, under the pressure of unprecedented diversification of human rights and fundamental freedoms, making traditional good morals increasingly relaxed. This explains the tendency of many modern codifications to include them in the broader concept of public order, as a component thereof. Even the French, known for their refusal, sometimes expressed manifestly, to adopt modern solutions, have agreed to reform their Civil Code, through the Ordinance on the reform of the contract law of 10 February 2016, by relating contractual freedom only to public order.
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The subject of our study is, in essence, the successoral transmission, an institution present in all the works of successions and on which one might think that there are no more aspects with a relatively novelty degree. We are trying to show here, however, some of these aspects, resulting, in addition, that the whole matter of the right of inheritance, although it is a classic segment of the civil law, has, however, unexpected reserves of „freshness”, which urge to the research, which offers new perspectives of approach.
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A special category of workers is represented, pursuant to the European and national norms, by the professional maternal assistants. In accordance with Article 1 of the Government Decision No 679/2003, these are natural persons, legally certified, who ensure, through the activity they carry out at their home, the raising, care and education necessary for the harmonious development of the children they receive in placement or in their custody. Although maternal assistants carry out their activity under an individual employment contract (of a special nature), they do not benefit by all the rights in their fullness which the other workers have. Thus, they do not have the right, only restrictively and with permission, to weekly rest, days off or rest leave. This situation is justified by the superior interest of their mission, that of ensuring the raising, care and education of children, their integration without discriminations in the family of the assistants. This is the reason why the European Court of Justice (Grand Chamber) has ruled (in the Romanian Case C-147/17) that the activity of maternal assistant does not fall within the scope of Directive 2003/88.
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The procedure of registration of forgery is a procedural incident regarding the evidence by written documents, which can usually have as its object an authentic written document or a written document registered under private signature. In the case of authentic written documents, the procedure of forgery may be used when the authenticity of the findings made personally by the person who authenticated the document is contested, according to the law. In the case of the written documents under private signature, the procedure of forgery can be used when it is claimed that they have been fabricated, being admissible also in the assumption that such a document has been recognized by its author or has been verified in court, if it is proved that the recognition was the result of an actually excusable error. The investigation and establishment of forgery shall be carried out by the criminal prosecution bodies and criminal examination body or by the civil court, by incidental way, in the event that the criminal action cannot be initiated or cannot continue. The procedure of registration of forgery is applicable regardless of the nature of the forgery (material or intellectual) and false written document is also the one whose content is not real, even if there has not been committed by the operation of altering the reality. The provisions of Articles 304-308 of the Civil Procedure Code regulate the procedure applicable in the assumption of registration of forgery against a written document produced in a pending litigation, in which case the provisions of Article 315, of Article 5491 and of Article 580 of the Criminal Procedure Code must be complied with.
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Divorce requires a continuous monitoring of the quality of adults-children relationships, as well as the development of some emotional connections based on authenticity, availability, respect, safety and warmth. In order to resolve the misunderstandings between parents regarding the exercise of rights and the fulfilment of duties, the court asks the delegate of the guardianship authority to conduct a psychosocial inquiry with regard to the conditions in which a child is raised and educated and how the parents fulfil their duties towards the child. One of the objectives of the psychosocial investigation must be to monitor the dynamics of the relations between the child and the parents after the divorce, because these relations do not have a fixed trajectory, being in a continuous modification and development. In the civil procedural law we do not find a minimum set of norms that regulate the procedure of carrying out the „psychosocial investigation” and the content of the „psychosocial investigation report”, a circumstance that has generated mainly a non-unitary case law, lacking the psychological component.
