News

Communication interception versus the right of individuals to respect of privacy

Monday, 31 of January 2011, at 14.00, in the small conference room of the Jolly Allon Hotel, the Centre for Combating Economic Crimes and Corruption (CCCEC) together with the Anticorruption Alliance (ACA), organized a roundtable discussion (brainstorming) on the topic of "Communication interception and the right to privacy, procedural aspects and ECtHR case-law ".

The main objective of the event was to identify existing problems, violations committed in the interception and recording of communication, in order to find solutions that would help to avoid future convictions by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). Moreover, reviewing of national legislation on interception of telephone conversations is provided in the National Annotated Agenda for the implementation of the EU-Republic of Moldova Visa Liberalisation Dialogue, aiming to achieve a high level of operational and special investigative capacity of law enforcement services and its consistent and efficient use to tackle cross-border crime.

The event was attended by representatives of the law enforcement, central public authorities, lawyers, independent experts and representatives of the civil society, including of members of the ACA, thus bringing their contribution to the process of legislative reform in this field.

The main conclusions reached at the end of the roundtable were the following:

-          There is a stringent need of setting up a working group for reviewing the legal framework regulating the communication interception, in compliance with the ECHR standards, bearing in mind the specific circumstances of the R. Moldova and the interest of investigation. To be effective, the working group will have to include representatives of the law enforcement, civil society, judges, lawyers, national and international experts;

-          The working group will have to start with a preliminary research on the situation and statistics regarding the practice of interceptions’ authorization from the past years, as well as after the enactment of the Prosecutor General’s Instruction from July 2010, to scrutinize the ECtHR jurisprudence in the case of Iordachi and others v./ R. Moldova, as well as other cases against other states;

-          There should be a systemic approach of the issue, by preparing of a package of draft legal acts (amendments to the Criminal Procedure Code, Criminal Code, Law on operative investigation activity etc.), in order to avoid discrepancies that might appear in case of gradual amendment of different laws;

-          Detailed regulation of the procedure of interception’s authorization in laws, in order to exclude such regulations being contained solely in intra-departmental agreements and in agreements with telecommunication operators, to enable the R. Moldova to meet the requirements of “sufficiently clear laws” in cases of interference with the fundamental human right to privacy during the interception of communication;

-          There will be a clear need to carry out intense training of operative and criminal investigators, prosecutor and investigation judges on the new standards to be introduced, prior to their coming into effect, in order to achieve a mentality  change and to establish a uniform application of the law.