Romanian Judges’ Forum Association – White Paper – Cooperation protocols between the Romanian Information Service and various judicial authorities

Romanian Judges’ Forum Association – White Paper – Cooperation protocols between the Romanian Information Service and various judicial authorities with jurisdiction in criminal matters:

In essence, on the basis of currently available data in the public space, we appreciate that we cannot take advantage of the highly promoted media ambiguity of the „illegitimate character” of the Romanian Information Service – Prosecutor’s Office attached to the High Court of Cassation and Justice protocol, in order to cancel all the efforts of criminal justice from recent years, insofar as there has been no evidence of real substantive issues for which there are anyway legal remedies in individual cases.

In the case of a reasonable suspicion of a breach of the functional competence in conducting the criminal investigation, the verification of the lawfulness of the administration of evidence is the exclusive competence of the criminal courts, given that all magistrates have the right to access classified information and the defendant’s lawyer may be granted this access upon request.

We argue that there is a concrete need to moderate a real public hysteria on this topic, likely to result in direct pressure on the courts, for example, to rule solutions for acquittal of all offenders discovered based on information provided by the Romanian Information Service.

A legislative intervention in this field, generated exclusively and undifferentiated only by this context of „secret protocols”, would seriously harm the prosecution of many serious crimes, such as organized crime or terrorism, because the technical measures performed by Romanian Information Service at the disposal of the prosecutor’s offices or of the courts did not only regard the corruption offenses, these being the only ones that fuelled the „conspiracy theory” the most because of the quality of the active subjects

Dragos Calin,
judge,
Bucharest Court of Appeals,
Romanian Judges’ Forum Association Co-President