PG Lazar: Operationalization of European Prosecutor's Office, priority of this moment

Romania's Prosecutor General Augustin Lazar on Thursday said that the European Prosecutor's Office is a priority of the moment. 

"The operationalization of the European Prosecutor's Office represents a priority right now and a priority of the Presidency of the Council of the European Union. In 2016, after years of scientific research, together with other EU prosecutors general, we published an appeal letter, pointing out the necessity of setting up the European Prosecutor's Office through enhanced cooperation, namely the agreement of at least 9 Member States. (...) The regulation was approved by the JHA Council in October 2017, Romania being one of the 20 founding states. (...) It has already been a year since the legislative base of the European Public Prosecutor's Office was completed. In order for this European institution to function effectively, however, the Member States, including Romania, must go through a difficult stage, marked by the operationalization efforts of this supranational prosecutor's office," Lazar told the European Conference on the Impact of the EU Regulation on the Establishment of the European Prosecutor's Office. 

He stated that the Public Ministry was involved in the operationalization of the European Public Prosecutor's Office both through the National Anticorruption Directorate (DNA), which has the competence to prosecute the offenses, as well as through the human resources support made available by the Prosecution Office attached to the High Court of Cassation and Justice for coordinating and drawing up a study analyzing this issue. 

"Personally, I am a supporter of the European Prosecutor's Office since the emergence of the idea in the corpus iuris, so I am convinced at the first evaluation of this new EU body in 2022 the results obtained will be important, then we should move on to the extension of the competences of the European Prosecutor's Office to the other types of offenses referred to in Article 86 (4) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, serious cross-border crimes and those affecting several Member States," Lazar added.