The criminal offences against the safety of railway traffic are provided for in the new Criminal Code under Title VII “Criminal Offences against Public Safety”, Chapter I. Taking into account the critical observations expressed in our doctrine, starting with the year 2006, the lawmaker has amended and supplemented both two criminal offences as regards their names, and the content of the others. Regarding the content of criminal offences, we mention that the amendments made refer both to the capacity of active subject and to that of passive subject, which this time may belong to the employees of both State-owned and private-owned operators. Nevertheless, when identifying the most important social values and, subsequently, protecting them by means of criminal law rules, the lawmaker did not take into consideration the current legislation, both domestic and of the European Union regarding the safety of railway traffic and transports. Thus, the most important European and domestic regulations in this field, which had to be taken into consideration in the activity of legal individualization of criminal law penalties, are the Directive 2004/49/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 29 April 2004 (the Railway Safety Directive) and Law no. 55/2006 on railway safety. The critical observations and the proposals made by the author refer precisely to the need to adapt the Romanian railway safety legislation to the European Union legislation.

The most important normative act, which regulates the matter of establishing, organizing and dissolving societies, is Law No 31/1990. According to Article 1 (1) of the Law No 31/1990, for the purpose of carrying out activities for profit, natural persons and legal persons may associate and form companies with legal personality, in compliance with the provisions of this law. Article 1 (2) of the same law provides that the companies referred to in paragraph (1) based in Romania are Romanian legal entities. Violations of legal norms regulating the establishment, organization, modification and cessation of the activities of societies can be manifested in various forms and may, as the case may be, imply criminal, civil, disciplinary, tax liability etc. Taking into account the fact that the companies have a special importance in the field of business, the Romanian legislature criminalizes certain facts of violation of the norms provided by the Law No 31/1990.

The offences regulated by the Law No 31/1990 on companies form a domain relatively less explored by the criminal law specialists and quasi-unexplored by the civil law specialists. In this study, the authors deal with those offences grouped within Article 272 of the above-mentioned law. These offences have a few specific elements. First, assuming there is a legal rule, the active subject is qualified, that is a person holding a certain quality of company member. Secondly, for two of the offences, the assumption of criminal rule is another rule, of the company law, to which the criminal law rule refers. By the fact that there is a situation such as the latter, but also because the assumptions of the other offences provided in Article 272 are part of the company law, first it is the duty of the civil law specialist to decode the meaning of the material rule, because a rigid application of the purely criminal vision in a field of the private law can lead to wrong conclusions, with serious consequences on the subjects of the offences. But, in order to cover the entire interpretative area, the same consideration must be given, according to the authors, to the criminal matters as well, where the role of the criminal law specialist steps in, so that the reader – either a civil law specialist or a criminal law specialist – forms a proper idea about a far too little investigated field.

In this study, the author examines the relevant aspects for proper understanding of the regulations set out in a chapter of the new Romanian Criminal Code (Law no. 286/2009, as subsequently amended and supplemented) entitled “State border crimes”. It was noted that such a chapter has no counterpart in the Criminal Code regulations, which entered into force in 1969; this does not mean it is an absolute novelty in the Romanian legal landscape. The study makes an interesting comparison between the wordings included in the subdivision of the new Criminal Code and the ones in Government Emergency Ordinance no. 105/2001 and Government Emergency Ordinance no. 194/2002 which have served as inspiration for the legislator.

Until the entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon, the citizens of the Member States of the European Union were participating in the democratic life of the European Union by their recognized right to submit petitions to the European Parliament and the right to address the European Ombudsman. The Treaty on the European Union (TEU) reinforces the citizenship of the Union and enhances the democratic functioning of the Union providing, among others, that every citizen must have the right to participate in the democratic life of the Union through a European citizens’ initiative. This procedure gives the citizens the opportunity to directly contact the European Commission, by presenting to the Commission an application whereby it is invited to initiate a proposal for a legislative act of the Union in view of implementing the Treaties, the procedure being similar to the right conferred to the European Parliament under Article 2251 of the Treaty on the functioning of the European Union (TFEU) and on the right conferred to the Council under Article 2412 of the TFEU.