I was searching the web for some breaking news in the past week but nothing I read caught my atention. Many were outraged about the new liability law for judges and prosecutors. Some decided to demand a new parliamentary debate, others kept their indignation private but everybody was talking. Accepting the disapproving looks I’m going to get… I don’t get it. We had a liability law until now and nobody seemed eager to apply it. The problem was not with the law but with what we do with it. Now we have a new text and apparently it has the potential of being the devil in disguise. The problem, I heard, was that somebody, somewhere, sometime can decide to give a certain interpretation to the legal text and in this cunning way to destroy our careers. Are we serious? We are starting to sound like those annoying persons that belive in the conspiracy theory. It’s normal not to wear shorts in court, it’s normal to be a civilized person in your day to day life and I’m preety sure it’s illegal to hit your child whether or not you’re a prosecutor or a judge. The possibility to get to the worst case scenario with this law is like a never ending story: we have to apply the law, we have to find the evil person that will turn the law against us, we have to find motives, means, oportunity… and please remember that we have to find a way to deny access to an independent tribunal. So it’s kind of a lot of trouble for the head of one single judge or one single prosecutor, isn’t it?
Getting back to the boring last week I read that the Supreme Court was called to decide whether or not a certain person was a collaborator of the Former Communist Secret Police. For those of you that don’t know what I am talking about it was 22 years ago so you have a good excuse. Personally I will be glad to see the Supreme Court do other things… again I don’t get why we stay transfixed in the past. Do we really need, in 2012, to put a scarlet letter on every person that had something to do with the communist regime? What’s the value of the public shame after more than 20 years? Accepting again the disapproving looks I say what’s done it’s done and maybe it’s time for the witch hunt to stop. Speaking of the former communist regime I don’t see a lot of my peers having real moral problems with the communist spirit accepted and embraced in the criminal code. If it wouldn’t be sad it would be funny that stealing a car can bring you 12 years in prison but hitting a judge can bring you only 4 and a half. It’s also strange that stealing is in the eye of our criminal law equal to taking a bribe… I know, I know it’s all about the money or better said the lack of them but it’s hard for me to picture a public figure accepting a bribe because he/she was hungry. Those being said I think I get it: we despise anything that is related to that historic period if it is obvious, it is public and can be used in a speech and we accept the remains of the communist ideology, like „the patrimony is more valuable than the person” because only few of our citizens really give a damn about the subject.
As I said it was an uneventful week so people tend to think more about unrelated subjects… promise not to do it next week.
