A special unit will be created in the SRI that will deal with corruption, says Nicușor Dan. “She will have only one task”
President Nicușor Dan. Inquam Photos / Octav Ganea
The President says that the involvement of the Romanian Intelligence Service in the fight against corruption, which was introduced in the National Defense Strategy, will involve the establishment of a special “unit”, which will have “one role”: gathering information about the phenomenon of corruption.
Nicușor Dan made these statements on Wednesday, upon leaving the Parliament, where he presented, in plenary, the National Defense Strategy. He was asked what will be different from what it was in the past regarding the SRI's involvement in corruption cases.
“SRI is an intelligence service that has a division into departments that follows from the strategy and then from the implementation plan. There are these departments that deal with counter-espionage, sabotage, others with organized crime.
By the fact that we have put the corruption chapter very explicitly in the strategy, we will have a unit or a section within the SRI that will deal with corruption. His only task will be to gather information about the phenomenon of corruption”, answered Nicușor Dan.
In the speech in the plenary session of the Parliament, the president said that, explicitly, “the strategy provides for the involvement of intelligence services in collecting data on corruption, without, however, crossing the border between the information system and the justice system, and correcting the legislative and administrative mechanisms that delay the judgment of acts of corruption and give the public the feeling that nothing is happening in this area”.
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Nicusor Dan said, at the presentation of the National Strategy for the Defense of the Country, that the fight against corruption is very important and that, first of all, there must be greater coordination between the institutions that deal with this phenomenon and, secondly, “we must prioritize the big corruption, because at the moment it is a mixture between different areas of corruption”.
The limits that CCR imposed on SRI
The involvement of the secret services in the judicial act has been limited by a series of decisions that the Constitutional Court has made in the last decade.
In March 2016, the CCR established that the Romanian Intelligence Service cannot be involved in the criminal investigation activity, according to Free Europe.
In 2018 came another CCR decision which established that evidence obtained with the SRI technique must be excluded from criminal files.
In March 2019, the Constitutional Court analyzed the collaboration protocols concluded by prosecutors' offices with the SRI between 2009 and 2016. The judges then ordered that the evidence collected with the help of SRI officers until February 2016, the date of the first CCR decision, had to be annulled, if it had been obtained on the basis of these protocols.
In another 2020 decision, the CCR said that wiretapping is constitutional provided it provides human rights guarantees.
