Constitutional Court Postpones Decision On Parliament-Public Ministry Protocol Judicial Conflict

A decision in the case was initially set for Tuesday on November 28, following a meeting in which the two sides argued their points of view on the matter, with Lower Chamber Deputy Chairman Florin Iordache representing the Parliament and Iuliana Nedelcu representing the Public Ministry.

The Parliament’s representative stated that the post-2009 situation regarding protocols in Romania was “very serious,” comparing it to the communist era, when the Securitate secret service was in charge of criminal investigations. Iordache argued that the protocols offered the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI) the capacity to act as secret prosecution bodies and damaged the “sovereign attribution of courts” to pronounce rulings in court cases.

On the other hand, the Public Ministry’s representative deemed Iordache’s comparison to Stalinist judicial practices as an “emotional rhetoric”, adding that the said protocols were simply technical agreements between the parties which did not set any norms in judicial practice.

The debate was postponed several times, most recently on November 14, because the author of the constitutional notification, Florin Iordache, could not take part in Wednesday’s meeting to defend the Parliament’s point of view.

Lower Chamber Deputy Chairman Florin Iordache filed the notification on October 8, after Chairman Liviu Dragnea empowered him to do so.

In the challenge, the Lower Chamber states that the Public Ministry “overregulated” the Romanian Intelligence Service through a 2016 judicial collaboration protocol, by “usurping” Parliamentary competencies to transform the secret service into a prosecuting body.

Florin Iordache was one of the harshest critics of the secret protocol signed between the two institutions in late 2016, stating last months that Romania’s General Prosecutor Augustin Lazar, one of the document’s signatories, transformed SRI into a “criminal investigation body” through the document’s clauses.

The former justice minister stated in the past that the document ruled over the country’s Criminal Procedure Code, reason for which he believed it could be considered a constitutional conflict.

The protocol in question regulated judicial cooperation between the two institutions on matters of national security.

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