The right of certain persons of not giving statements as witnesses in the Romanian Code of Criminal Procedure

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”.