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The Code of Criminal Procedure provides some exceptions, from the general rule according to which any persons can be heard as witness, as there are certain persons that can not become witnesses in a criminal trial; these persons are as follow: persons that can not be heard as witnesses and persons that are entitled to decline to testify. We consider that the stipulations of the current Code of Criminal Procedure regarding the persons that can not be forced to testify in some criminal cases is criticisable in terms of requirements of legislative technique regarding the usage of a concise, clear style and a correct terminology. Also, in order to correlate the stipulations of the Code of Criminal Procedure with the ones of the current Criminal Code, we propose, de lege ferenda, a modification of the criminal procedural stipulations regarding the persons that can refuse to testify as witness, by using the expression “family member of the suspect or of the defendant”.

It is a well-known fact that the so called “white collar crimes” now implies a wide variety of offenses (including bribery) that can affect the lives of more individuals than the “classic” crimes. An analysis of corruption necessarily implies an interdisciplinary approach, as it has multiple facets: social, political, economic and juridical. The New Criminal Code of Romania (NCC) has brought a series of important changes, compared to the previous regulation. All forms of corruption involve an abusive use of power (public or private), for a personal gain, occurring regardless of the form of government or historical period.

Delegating the sovereignty from the citizens to the Government is necessary, to a certain degree, in order to ensure the efficiency of the constitution and the separation of powers, as well as the process of lawmaking. However the complex structure that we now call a “state” and that already seems to have reached its limitations is often perceived as a cold, impersonal structure, in which citizens are becoming only an insignificant part, an interchangeable wheel in a grand design. Thus the decision tends to become more distant from the citizens, than it was in the Greek democracy for example. The new means of communication, especially the Internet, give the citizen the possibility to be closer to the decisions taken by the legislator. The building of a “virtual agora” in which citizens are asked to participate directly to their own governing seems an achievable dream. Main difficulties towards such an ambitious goal are no longer of a technological nature, but of transforming the traditional law making process, the somehow rigid essential characteristics that the rule of law must have, with the direct exercise of sovereignty, by the citizens, if not in all matters, at least at a local, administrative level.