2014

While the old Penal Code did not use the generic term “corruption offenses”—which appeared only in Law No. 78/2000 on the prevention, detection, and punishment of acts of corruption—the new Penal Code includes, in Title V, a chapter specifically dedicated to this category of offenses. The changes introduced regarding corruption offenses by the Criminal Code, which entered into force on February 1, 2014, were intended, on the one hand, to enshrine in the Code legislative solutions that had previously been found only in special legislation, and, on the other hand, to bring Romanian criminal law into line with relevant international conventions, as well as, at least in part, with GRECO’s recommendations. We note certain changes to the constituent elements of the offenses regulated in this chapter; some of these are merely linguistic, while others are changes whose potential effect of broadening or narrowing the scope of criminal liability warrants analysis. The most interesting change in the new regulatory framework concerns the definition of a public official—the subject of the offense of accepting a bribe and the person in connection with whom the other corruption offenses are committed. By abandoning the outdated distinction between the concepts of “public official” and “official” found in the old Penal Code, the current formulation aims to provide a modern definition that is more in line with the standards of international conventions and that resolves certain controversies that have arisen in judicial practice to date. The extent to which the legislature’s goal of providing more appropriate regulation of corruption offenses has been achieved remains to be verified by judicial practice as well as by doctrinal analysis; this paper is part of that effort.
    
Keywords: corruption offenses; public official; bribery; GRECO