Parliament on Monday morning reopenend, debating an amendment to the Penal Code that entails the scrapping of the Special Prosecutor's Office. The session started with a procedural question: whether this bill can be discussed in a fast-track procedure, as the government wants. A total of 58 MPs have asked for speaking time.
The ruling coalition is proposing to abolish the institution as a matter of urgency and considers it politicized. Gábor Grendel, of the opposition party Slovakia, disagrees: “Justice is threatened in Slovakia by the steps taken by the government. These are not a move towards security in Slovakia, but demonstrate that the government hastily gets rid of the institution that every mafia fears.“
The opposition argues that the government wants to push the reform of the criminal system through the parliament in an accelerated procedure, when the Council of Prosecutors and the European Commission object to a hasty procedure.
But Prime Minister Robert Fico claims the opposite. “It is the institution which has significantly contributed to human rights violations. There are 30 rulings of the Constitutional Court of the Slovak Republic, there are decisions by the Supreme Court which confirm how badly human rights were violated in the preparatory proceedings.”
SaS MP Mária Kolíková points out that the reform of the criminal system is about more than lowering sentences for corruption crimes.
“This is not just about criminal rates going down. This is also about the fact that wiretaps will not be able to be done, people will be in completely different prisons. Of course, Mr. Minister, you are shaking your head here, because, of course, it is so.”
Minister of Justice Boris Susko is sitting in the chamber - but not participating in the debate. At the end of last year, however, he said that high financial penalties are just as good a deterrent as long prison sentences: “The financial penalties that can be imposed on individual offenders for economic property crime are so high indeed that they are actually an alternative to the deterrent effect of criminal law in terms of imprisonment.”
The debate on the Office of the Special Prosecutor could take weeks, considering the number of MP’s who want to speak out about it. And this is just about the procedure, fast track or not – the debate about the bill itself has yet to start.
(RTVS)
