Republic of Moldova

Recentdevelopments in the judicial field (december 2016-june 2017)

1.      Courts map optimization

The law of courts reorganization entered into force on 1 January 2017, and 15 new first instance courts started its activity after being merged from 42 first instance courts .

The district specialised commercial court and military court ceased its activity from 1 April 2017, but according to the law from 1 of July, the new created courts have to specialise their judges or panels of judges in different matters such as criminal, civil, administrative.

The document does not come up with amendments in terms of the number of judges in Moldova, but only concerning the number of courts. In this regard, according to the law,  the Superior Council of Magistracy  established and approved the number of judges, the way in which they will be assigned to the courts according to the workload per system. The reorganization of the justice system refers to the first instance courts.

As well, according to the law, ”the unification of the headquarters of law courts will be made gradually till 31 December 2027, commensurate with the creation of conditions for this, in line with a plan approved by the Parliament at a Government’s proposal.” The mentioned plan was approved by the Parliament on 3 rd of March 2017. According to the Plan the Government will ensure the annual allocation of financial means in accordance with the approved capital investment plan.

     The main Government’s priorities are for 2017:

a)       to ensure and coordinate the process of identifying land for the construction of new buildings or, as the case may be, identifying an existing building necessary for the proper functioning of the court system;

b)       To appoint the members of the Monitoring Group to implement the Plan in order to make the process of building new court houses and / or renovation of existing  court buildings necessary for the proper functioning of the court system, investment attraction, rational cost management, as well as and ensuring that civil society is involved in the monitoring process;

c)       To  elaborate of project-type documentation of a building for Moldovan courts in accordance with the Practical Building Code. Rayon (town) district buildings CP C.01.04-2007 (MSP 3.02-101-2001) and international standards.

 The Integrated Case Management System (ICMS) was adjusted to the mentioned law and new version was implemented in all courts, with  exception of the Supreme Court of Justice which has a different ICMS version due to own specific procedures.   The revised version of ICMS allows automate random distribution of cases taking into account case complexity and specialization of judges.

2.      Judicial mediation

In order to reduce the length of procedures, judicial mediation was established as a mandatory way of settling the claims to the court by LP 31 of 17.03.17 (MO144-148 / 05.05.17) by simplifying the procedures for some types of actions, such as family law disputes, disputes concerning property rights between physical and / or legal persons of private law, labor disputes, disputes resulting from tort liability, inheritance disputes, other civil litigations evaluated less than 200 000 MDL (approximately 10 000 EUR), with exception of litigations in which an enforceable decision to initiate insolvency proceedings was made).

3.      E-justice

Ministry of Justice has   developed e-justice tools  in order to allow to file a case in court by electronic means using the electronic signature and add/access all electronic case files, documents, evidence for trial participants. The developed tool also allows to courts to send summons by electronic means to the parties and coordination of the hearings calendar between judge and  trial participants.

The  application will be interconnected with last ICMS version and it will be tested for 6 months in a pilot court appointed by the Superior Council of Magistracy, before being implemented in the entire judicial system.

4.         CEPEJ cooperation program

The program final report with recommendations was disseminated to al national courts. The courts were kindly invited  to analyze their performance using CEPEJ methodology and publish the results on their websites.

The Ministry of Justice  established a list of priorities taking into account the final report’s recommendations. The recommendations on improving the ICMS were presented to the USAID project entitled “Open Justice” and were divided in two modules. First module has to be implemented till the end of 2017 and second module-next year by developing a new ICMS version.

Also, the Ministry of Justice published on it’s website an analytical report on court performance for 2016, using CEPEJ  recommended performance indicators.

We would like to thank CEPEJ for provided assistance by the CEPEJ experts and for fruitful collaboration. If the project will be extended we would ask for expanded trainings in using CEPEJ methodology and data collection for court staff, taking into account that the National Institute of Justice trains judges, judicial assistants, but the other court staff which is also directly involved in collecting and analyzing statistical data is not trained in this regard.