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Legal separation („separația de corp”) is a quasi-divorce, which does not lead to the dissolution of the marriage, but produces certain legal consequences on personal and patrimonial relations between spouses. Based on religious motivations, legal separation is the compromising solution adopted in states of Catholic religion, in which marriage is seen as an indissoluble and perpetual bond. Although known in several Member States of the European Union (EU), legal separation has meanings, conditions, procedure and effects that differ from one state to another. In Romanian law, the institution of legal separation is not regulated. The Orthodox religion, predominant in Romania, rejects the dogma of the indissolubility of marriage and allows divorce. However, in the Civil Code, among the provisions of private international law there is a rule indicating the law applicable to legal separation. The use of the notion, which is otherwise singular, is not accompanied by a definition or explanation of the term. In the European regulations (the Regulation Brussels II bis on jurisdiction1 and the Regulation Rome III on the applicable law2 ), directly applicable in Romania, two similar notions are used, those of „separare de drept” (legal separation) and of „separare de corp” (separation of body). -
Neutral power can manifest itself in modern liberal democracies also in the form of autonomous authorities. Their neutrality is based on two kinds of reasons. The first category involves the positioning of the neutral authorities outside the separation of powers in the state, their reactive (not active) political character and their role of balancing the separate powers of the state or of balancing the relations between the state and civil society. They are in the Romanian law authorities with constitutional status. The second category of authorities that call/consider themselves neutral founds its position on the neutrality of the experts in their structure. They have in the Romanian Constitution the status of some atypical, autonomous administrative authorities. Modern states are based on political freedom, i.e. on the liberation of man from objective laws. The expression of this freedom substantiates all the institutional mechanisms of modern constitutionalism. In exchange, the autonomous administrative authorities are set up to release the regulation of certain social mechanisms of political influence. They are not based on modern political freedom. Formed of experts who know the „objective” laws of social development and apply them „scientifically”, these authorities are „objective”. It is thus created a dichotomy: the people or the expert? The increasingly dense contemporary option for the expert can lead to significant risks for the human rights and for the democratic system.
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This article analyzes amendments brought to the institution of authority of res judicata by the new Civil Procedure Code, in relation to the manner in which the doctrine and the case-law have determined the development of this institution. -
The present study aims to analyze the autonomy of will regarding the civil legal act, by reference to the limitations that the legal norms, public order or good morals set both in terms of substance and formally. The legal will, a complex psychological phenomenon which is the basis of the conclusion of any legal act, is governed by two basic principles, namely the principle of real will and the principle of freedom or autonomy of will. The principle of real will, enshrined in Romanian law, gives valency to the internal/psychological element to which the party is animated at the conclusion of the civil legal act. As for the principle of autonomy of will, it finds its legal consecration in Article 1169 of the Civil Code, establishing the parties’ freedom to conclude any contracts and to establish their content. However, this freedom must not be viewed in absolute terms, knowing a series of limitations of substance and form, which we have pointed out in this article. -
Presenting the specific fundamental rights granted to the European citizens, of the new rights guaranteed in compliance with the progress and development of the society and taking into consideration the case law of the European Court of Human Rights and of the Court of Justice of the European Union, the author emphasizes the autonomous nature of the Charter of fundamental rights of the European Union. The fact that the Charter of fundamental rights of the European Union is granted a binding legal value after the Treaty of Lisbon enters into force, shall have an important part for the accession of the European Union to the (European) Convention for the protection of human rights and of fundamental freedoms. The Charter of fundamental rights of the European Union shall contribute to the acquirement of the important part that the European Union will play on the international stage, in the field of the human rights protection. -
The declarative establishment of democratic traditions or insurrectional ideals at a constitutional level is legitimate and explicable as an element of public law philosophy and social psychology, but also of national identification, especially in situations where the Constituent Assembly established a democratic political regime, opened to the aspirations of a nation that has liberated itself from the authoritarianism of a tyrannical government system. However, the issue we are raising is whether democratic traditions are justified in a normative regulation. In my opinion, the proper place to preserve the national values and the historical political and juridical traditions of a people cannot be the normative text of the Constitution, because it, as a fundamental normative act, from the point of view of positive law, has the role to regulate political, social and economic relations and others as valid social phenomena measurable politically and legally. The original place of the traditions and values of a community lies in its public consciousness and in the general lifestyle. Here, they retain intact the ideological content and form, as they penetrated through objective scientific knowledge, as well as through a spiritual path in the individual’s consciousness, and extended to successive generations. In this way, democratic traditions acquire an explanatory role for the philosophy of public law. A question arises: if democratic traditions are transposed by constitutional norms in the national legal order and converted into constitutional traditions, can they be challenged scientifically and historically? Contesting the democratic traditions in a scientific work or denying their existence, as well as legislating some areas of social life without considering the Romanian constitutional traditions, are subjected to malpractice or even sanctioned by the law?
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Chestiunea pusă în teză generală la înălțimea principiilor fundamentale ale dreptului nostru public trece peste importanța litigiului concret cu ocazia căruia se pune această chestie. Suntem deci datori a o examina la acea înălțime și justiția la rândul ei e datoare și în drept să-i dea soluția care o va crede mai conformă acelor principii. Fără îndoială că nu este fără greutate considerația generală ce s’a invocat că dispozițiunile constituționale ar putea să rămână fără efect, dacă ar fi permis legiuitorului ordinar să distrugă prin opera sa legislativă bazele pe care este clădit tot edificiul vieței noastre publice, așa cum este el așezat în pactul nostru fundamental și dacă justiția nu ar avea dreptul să repună la loc părțile vătămate ale acestui edificiu. -
In this study, the author analyzes the possibility of granting the public judicial aid, according to the national legislation and the case law of the European Court of Human Rights, regarding the bail necessary to be paid in the cases regarding the provisional suspension of enforcement, according to Article 719 (7) of the Civil Procedure Code. Regarding the situation prior to pronouncing the decision in the Case S.C. ECO INVEST S.R.L. and Ilie Bolmadar versus Romania, special attention is paid to the way of transposing the Directive of the Council of the European Union 2003/8/EC to improve the access to justice in cross-border disputes by establishing some minimum common rules relating to the legal aid for such disputes, as well as the jurisprudential reversal of the Case Micallef versus Malta. At the same time, there are emphasized the relevant provisions of the Government Emergency Ordinance No 51/2008 on judicial public aid in civil matters.
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The provisions of Article 169 of the Law No 85/2014 on the procedures for preventing insolvency and for insolvency regulate the responsibility aimed at covering the debtor’s liabilities in case its assets do not satisfy all the claims of its debtors. The mentioned legal provisions regulate expressly determined cases in which either the members of the supervisory bodies, or the members of the management bodies of the legal person which is in a state of insolvency or any other person that has caused the state of insolvency may be obliged to cover a part of the liabilities of the insolvent debtor, provided that the activity they carried out has led to the insufficiency of the available cash funds from the patrimony of the debtor legal person. In relation to the provisions of Article 171 of the mentioned normative act, the responsibility of the specified persons may be engaged in any form of the procedure, either in judicial reorganization, or in bankruptcy. In case of judicial reorganization, the amounts of money obtained as a result of the responsibility of the mentioned persons are intended to supplement the funds necessary for the continuation of the debtor’s activity, and, in case of bankruptcy, those amounts must ensure that the debtor’s liabilities are covered. The regulation of the responsibility of the members of the supervisory/management bodies or of any other person that has caused the state of insolvency of the debtor legal person is an integral part of the procedure provided by the law on insolvency.
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In this study, the author examines the problems of regulating the violations of private life by Article 74 of the current Romanian Civil Code (the Law No 287/2009, republished), in light of the relevant case-law of the European Court of Human Rights and of the Romanian courts, coming to the conclusion that the mentioned legal text judiciously summarizes the indicated case-law. -
Două opțiuni a avut Adunarea Constituantă în 1991 cu privire la echilibrarea raporturilor între puteri, îndeosebi între Parlament, ca depozitar suveran al puterii legislative și cele două autorități de vârf ale puterii executive: Președintele României și Guvernul 1 . Fiecare opțiune cu avantajele, neajunsurile și riscurile ei. Adunarea Constituantă ar fi putut să instituie republica parlamentară, ca specie eminamente și formal democratică a regimului parlamentar, consacrat și prin constituțiile din 1866 și din 1923, dar nealterat esențial de regimurile autoritare ulterioare, sau să modifice tradiția parlamentară a regimului politic și să instituie un alt tip de regim. Regimul prezidențial nici nu a intrat în calculele Adunării Constituante, deoarece acesta, ca tip de separație și echilibrare a puterilor, nu a putut fi extins la niciun popor în forma sa clasică, izbutită exclusiv în Statele Unite ale Americii... -
The evolution of the Romanian society in the direction of consolidating the rule of law is accompanied, in some cases, by the amplification of negative phenomena, materialized in the increase in the number of persons committing antisocial actions and evading criminal liability, which requires the taking of actions directly aimed at these categories of persons who can continue to commit crimes, some of them of extreme violence. At present, together with the adoption of the Government Emergency Ordinance no.60/2006 for amending and supplementing the Criminal Procedure Code, the national legislative framework regulating the procedure of starting criminal prosecution is in compliance with the European legal norms and meets the standards imposed by the European Union. The powers provided by the legislation are able to meet the requirements in this field and, at the same time, to support the efforts made by the judiciary police bodies specialized in the activity of investigating and tracking down persons evading the enforcement of judgments, whose ultimate purpose is the achievement of justice. -
In the current architecture of the Criminal Procedure Code, the regulation of the special methods of surveillance or investigation is based, from the perspective of the legislative technique, on a unified, foreseeable and predictable approach, eliminating the arbitrary. The special methods of surveillance or investigation are meant to contribute, by their results materialized in proofs, to proving in a direct manner the offences committed by the suspects or/and the defendants. The specificity and concrete particularities of the circumstances of some of the corruption offences, the offences assimilated to the corruption offences, as well as those of drug trafficking, trafficking in weapons, human trafficking, acts of terrorism, cybercrime, expressly enumerated within Article 139 (2) of the Criminal Procedure Code suppose that the probative includes, in a significant proportion, proofs obtained by way of special methods of surveillance or investigation. -
In this study, the author aims to highlight a number of limitations of the principle of availability in the second phase of the civil process, such as, for example, the need to approve enforcement by the court, the impossibility of representation of the legal person by another legal person, execution by persons or entities other than the creditor, as well as the imperceptible nature of certain goods. At the same time, this procedure cannot be initiated against those who enjoy immunity from enforcement, and the failure to register documents under private signature in the National Register of Real Estate Advertising was an impediment to enforcement until declaring the legal provisions of this obligation as unconstitutional. This presents the difficulties encountered by the holder of the writ of execution in his attempt to enforce it, as well as doctrinal and jurisprudential controversies, which led to the conclusion of the need to repeal the institution of approval of enforcement. -
This study examines preliminarily the documents upon which the Court of Accounts concretizes its activity, and it analyses further in a detailed manner the remedies at law against these documents, by emphasizing the non-unitary case law in the matter, namely: if the law court is competent in the first instance (the Administrative and Fiscal Section), and the Court of Appeal is competent in the second appeal (the Administrative and Fiscal Section) or, on the contrary, the Court of Appeal (the Administrative and Fiscal Section) is competent in the first instance, and the competence shall belong to the High Court of Cassation and Justice in the second appeal (the Administrative and Fiscal Section). Based upon a comprehensive analysis the authoress points out that the last solution shall be legal. -
The present study is dedicated to the approach from theoretical and practical perspective of the problem of instigation to commit an offence or to continue to commit an offence for the purpose of obtaining evidence in the context of using special investigative techniques. The problems presented are based on an ex post facto analysis, with applied character, by outlining some concrete hypotheses. There are highlighted aspects elaborated by the European Court of Human Rights by way of case law, but also relevant aspects from the national case law of Romania in order to identify the criteria for establishing the illegal nature of the activities of the criminal investigation bodies necessary to collect and provide evidence in the criminal trial. Likewise, there are presented and analyzed the conditions retained by the Strasbourg Court necessary to be fulfilled so that the activities of the state bodies do not exceed the scope of loyalty of administration of evidence. In addition, an attempt is made to delimit the instigation to commit offences from the legal activity of the undercover investigators in the context in which it has been authorized the use of the special method of investigation of using undercover investigators or collaborators, provided by the Criminal Procedure Code.
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Law No. 221/2009 regarding political convictions and their related administrative measures issued in the period comprised between March 6, 1945 – December 22, 1989 established, inter alia, that the victims of such convictions shall be entitled, within an interval of 3 years from the enforcement of this law (June 14, 2009) to request the Romanian State to pay moral damages (without any ceiling in terms of value) for the suffering caused by such convictions. The law was subsequently amended, in the sense that a ceiling was established for the value of such damages. In its first two decisions (No. 1358/2010 and No. 1360/2010), the Constitutional Court stated that both the original and the amended text of the law are unconstitutional, without denying, however, in principle, the fairness and lawfulness of granting such moral damages in the given situation. Until the present time, the Romanian State did not proceed to enact Law No. 221/2009, in consideration of the mentioned decisions issued by the Constitutional Court, although it was bound by the Constitution to proceed as such. Taking this situation into account, the author sets forth the idea that, at present, although we are apparently in the presence of a legislative void, the injured parties may claim, however, such damages in court, even at this time, on the strength of certain principles from the Constitution of Romania, from the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. -
By reference to the real guarantees, which, theoretically, ensure a greater security of the execution, the fidejussion prevails by a lower degree of formalism and by a much higher degree of flexibility. Through the fidejussion mechanism, the creditor will have as common guarantee at least two patrimonies: first of all, of course, the patrimony of the main debtor, but in addition to this patrimony it can also be satisfied from the patrimony of the fidejussor or fidejussors. No one can become a fidejussor-guarantor against his will. Regardless of its nature, the fidejussion has a contractual nature, being able to arise only through the agreement between the creditor and the fidejussor. The law or the judgment only requires to bring a personal guarantee. When a person is obliged, by law or by convention, to provide bail, and he does not voluntarily fulfil his obligation, the judgment of conviction does not convert the bail into a judicial one, it still remains legal or conventional, as the case may be. The judge only orders the execution of the legal provision or of the convention. Exceptionally, in certain situations, the law absolutely presumes the quality of a certain person as fidejussor. For example, there is a fidejussion, called an assimilated fidejussion, also in case a party undertakes to another party to grant a loan to a third party, in which case the creditor (the person to whom the commitment has been made) is guarantor (fidejussor) of the obligation to repay the loan received by the third party.
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Given the many amendments to the Government Emergency Ordinance no. 34/2006 and the entry into force of the new Code of Civil Procedure and the law implementing thereof, the author conducts an extensive review of the regulations relating to the appeal and recourse remedies at law, the competent courts of law and the possibility to join the appeals filed against the same public procurement procedure. In this context, the author carries out an analysis of a relatively recent and relevant judgment pronounced on a public procurement procedure by the Contentious Administrative and Fiscal Matters Section of the High Court of Cassation and Justice. -
The institution of the penal clause, regulated in Articles 1538–1543 of the new Civil Code, still encounters different interpretations, even contradictory sometimes, in the judicial practice and in the solutions of the courts. In particular, the interest of the practitioners and of the specialized doctrine is based on the possibility conferred to the court of law to reduce the penal clause in the two cases provided by the legislator, namely when the main obligation has been executed by the debtor to the benefit of the creditor and when the penalty is clearly excessive in relation to the prejudice which might have been foreseen by the parties on the conclusion of the contract. This study aims to analyse thoroughly the two hypostases in which the judge is allowed to defeat the principle of binding force of the contract and to intervene in the decrease of the quantum of penalties, an analysis materialized both from a theoretical point of view and especially from a practical point of view, offering relevant solutions from the recent judicial practice.
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The present study examines in detail the conditions for contracting authority’s cancellation of the award procedure for the public procurement contract, taking into account that the legislative act (Government Emergency Ordinance no. 34/2006 regarding the award of public procurement contracts, public works concession contracts and services) underwent the last 2-3 years - in the terms considered - radical changes likely to run on the current legal regime. -
The institution of appeal in the interest of law has the role of unitarily ensuring the interpretation and implementation of law by courts of law. The legal nature of this procedure is not determined only by the criminal and civil normative provisions governing it. This study argues that this institution is constitutional in nature because, under the Constitution, the High Court of Cassation and Justice has the power to ensure the unitary interpretation of law by the courts of law. There are analyzed the consequences of the constitutional nature of this institution, the limits of obligativity of the settlements of matters of law given by the High Court of Cassation and Justice by means of the decisions ruled in these proceedings, as well as the ratio between the decisions of the Constitutional Court and the decisions of the High Court of Cassation and Justice respectively, ruled for a solution on the appeals in the interest of law. Recent case-law of the Constitutional Court reveals new aspects regarding the possibility of verifying the constitutionality of decisions ruled on this matter. -
This study analyzes the particularities involved by the powers of the Court of Accounts to establish contraventions and to apply offences punishable in the specific activity of control/audit they achieve. Two categories of offences can be identified, namely contraventions that the Court of Accounts only finds, not having the power to apply sanctions against them, and contraventions for which the Court of Accounts is competent not only to identify them but also to apply the sanctions for them. The rules on contraventions that may be applicable to deviations discovered by the Court of Accounts can be found in the Law on the organization and functioning of the Court of Accounts No 94/1992, as well as in other special regulations that are analyzed in this article. The approach is carried out not only from a legislative and doctrinal perspective, but also from a case law perspective, being exemplified in some solutions given by the courts in cases concerning complaints against the contravention reports drawn up by the Court of Accounts. Finally, some conclusions are presented, which also include the authors’ point of view on the perspective approach, including by the legislator, of this issue. -
Leave of absence is a motivated missing (absence) from the workplace, being a period when the employee does not work. As the leave of absence from the workplace is not legally regulated by the normative acts in force, in practice, when the employee requests leave of absence in order to solve some personal matters, discussions arise as to whether or not he receives salary during the leave of absence. This study raises for discussion some considerations and proposals referring to the legal status of the leave of absence from the workplace, both for the employees from the budgetary sector and for the employees from the private sector.
