CCR admits referral on the conflict between Parliament and Public Ministry regarding protocols concluded with SRI. What next?

The Constitutional Court of Romania (CCR) has admitted the referral from the Chamber of Deputies regarding a conflict between Parliament and the Public Ministry, which provides, among others, that the protocols signed with the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI) continue to have effects, even after denouncing them, judicial sources say.

The CCR decision comes after several postponements. The decision is expected to have major impact on criminal files and points to the fact that the Prosecutor General’s Office, by concluding the protocols with SRI, allegedly has led to a conflict with the Parliament, the High Court of Cassation and Justice and the courts, ziare.com reports.

The questions that surface are related to the consequences: will the evidence provided in criminal investigations by the SRI Officers be eliminated? Will there be new ways for review of final sentences in lawsuits that considered such evidence?

CCR will have to answer these questions. It is about phone conversations, phone tapping, environmental recordings, stakeouts, computer or technical expertise, or translations from rare languages by translators employed by SRI. It is about evidence obtained by SRI until 2016, until the moment CCR decided that SRI should not operate technical surveillance in the files of prosecutors.

Such evidence is provided in the files of high level corruption, involving the ‘white collars’, organized crime, several interlopers and even complex investigations on homicide, the same source reads.

The CCR decision comes after the ruling of the Bucharest Court of Appeals that these protocols are not administrative documents, but mere understandings between two parties, understandings that had no legal effects.

The Bucharest Court of Appeals reasoned that the purpose of issuance was not to have legal effects, specific to administrative law, but to set up internal working procedures of institutional cooperation in the field of national security, as it is defined by Law no.51/1991 on Romania’s national security.