The Prosecutor General, Olsian Çela, reacted today regarding the draft presented for changes to the Criminal Code.
In his reaction, Çela states that before discussing the presented draft, it would have been necessary for this discussion to have been preceded by a societal reflection on the need for a new penal code, writes A2 CNN.
Çela also states that the spirit of the draft of the new criminal code has a repressive tendency that increases the potential for criminalization of the individual in society, expanding the circle of actions that are categorized as dangerous.
The Attorney General's reaction:
Before discussing the draft presented, it would have been necessary for this discussion to have been preceded by a societal reflection on the need for a new code. The current code was adopted in 1995 and has undergone numerous interventions to adapt it to the various needs of the country, so it cannot be said that it is not appropriate for the times or that there are serious difficulties in its implementation.
The lack of a preliminary process towards identifying supposedly insurmountable problems with the current code and which posed the need to completely change a fundamentally important law in the life of the country, which affects the lives of all citizens, naturally does not serve to find a broad-based consensus.
In 1995, due to a certain historical context, it was more than clear the need to break away from an authoritarian conception of the old penal code towards a code completely permeated by a liberal democratic spirit, which should represent the values of the society we aimed to build. This should have been the starting point for the process of drafting a new code, as a real need due to the evolution of social values and adaptation to rapid changes at the global level in many aspects, often quite delicate and for which it is not easy to find consensus. This process would have laid the appropriate philosophical, moral-legal foundation on which to build the structure of a new code. The lack of this process constitutes a fatal structural error in the construction of this edifice, which, rather than being the product of a natural institutional and social flow as a historical necessity, in fact represents nothing more than a hasty action that risks irreparably undermining the proper functioning of the criminal justice system in the country.
On the other hand, given the way in which the adoption of a code is operated, due to its extraordinary volume and complexity, the public consultation process and the subsequent parliamentary one, have little or no impact on its essence, which turns the public debate process into a formal and useless one, since it would not allow for a systematic intervention in the entirety of the draft. Given the product brought for discussion, I estimate that it would bring a lot of confusion to magistrates in the application of the norms and creates the premises for completely different interpretations of them in similar cases. Moreover, the technique used to construct the provisions makes it impossible to improve them through the public consultation process. The tendency to predetermine in the provisions every possible interpretation of the legal norm worsens the quality of its implementation and blocks the solution of the numerous problems that are impossible to foresee and that appear for those who implement the law to solve.
Also, the general spirit in the draft to expand the circle of actions that are categorized as dangerous to such an extent that they are classified as criminal offenses and punishable by imprisonment, shows a repressive tendency that increases the potential for criminalization of the individual in society and that brings significant consequences in the lives of citizens. On the other hand, certain regulations are noted in the general part of the draft that risk turning the illegal behavior of the individual at a certain moment in time into potentially punishable throughout life, going against the principles of legal certainty and humanism. These are precisely some of the principles that should have been clarified at the beginning of the drafting work, as a product of that missing, but fundamentally necessary, societal reflection, to undertake or not this initiative.
Beyond the above, given what is being discussed these days in the media about the draft, I do not think that the harsher punishments of imprisonment are the only and best solution to the multitude of problems that the country is going through, at a time when we have one of the harshest punishment codes at the European level. We have maintained this position institutionally in all law-making processes when we have been asked for a legal opinion. It must also be understood that the adjustments in the criminal law directly affect the application of procedural norms and their harmonization cannot be done without being preceded by a visionary approach to where we want to go.
Experience has shown that the lawmaking process in the country, at least as far as the justice system and especially the criminal legal framework are concerned, is flawed and is often influenced by the needs and emotions of the moment, failing to produce the desired effects. Given the scale of the consequences for decades when it comes to a code, this mistake should not be allowed to be repeated for such an important law, especially at a time when the justice system in the country is going through a difficult time, where such debates could be deeply influenced by a far from objective approach, beyond the cold legal logic that a criminal code requires.
The arrival of the draft at this very difficult moment for justice, when the system still suffers from massive staff shortages and an extraordinary overload of files, would do nothing but deepen the chaos in the investigation and judicial processes, due to the inevitable confusion that the implementation of the new criminal norms would bring. This can also be easily seen in the lack of a real contribution of magistrates in giving opinions on the draft since 2023, precisely because of the unbearable workload that does not allow them to be qualitatively involved in such a delicate and important process.
More than a new criminal code, today the country urgently needs intervention in the Criminal Procedure Code, to correct the things that are going wrong in its functioning and to simplify processes from unnecessary bureaucracy, which is affecting the delay of investigations and trials. (A2 Televizion)
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