In the legislative portfolio

Meeting of the Presidium of the highest legislative body took place traditionally on Tuesday. Its members discussed a number of legislations that were included in the agendas of the next plenary meetings of the Supreme Council. Responsible for most of them was the parliamentary committee on legislation, defense, security, peacekeeping, law enforcement agencies, and the protection of the rights and freedoms of citizens. In particular, deputies Galina Antyufeyeva, Grigory Dyachenko, Oleg Belyakov and Vitaliy Kalin acted as authors of the law-in-draft “On Amending and Adding to Some Legislative Acts of the PMR”. It is intended to improve the criminal procedural legislation governing legal relations in the field of secrecy of correspondence, telephone and other negotiations, postal, telegraphic and other communications. The essence of the deputy proposals is that the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Republic is supplemented by a new article. It establishes the judicial procedure for obtaining permission to conduct investigative actions related to obtaining information about connections between subscribers and (or) subscriber devices. In accordance with this, the current norms of the laws “On operational search activity” and “on telecommunications” will also have to be adjusted. The adoption of new legislative norms correlates with the process of harmonization of the criminal procedural legislation of our republic with a similar one in force in the Russian Federation.

The law requires every citizen of the PMR to have a passport. This is the main document proving the identity of the owner and confirming Pridnestrovian citizenship. At the same time, the cost of documents and the costs associated with the operations for issuing them are recovered from passport holders. However, there is a category of persons who are not able to do this for financial reasons, for example, those released from places of deprivation of liberty or convicts who are there and who do not have funds in personal accounts.

Taking into consideration this situation, Vadim Krasnoselsky proposed legislatively to improve the mechanism of financing by the state the certification of persons serving their sentences of imprisonment. This is due to the constant increase in the number of applicants to the passport offices of the Department of Migration Affairs of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, in whose service areas there are correctional facilities. The number of people who applied for documentation and did not have money in their personal account for the period of 2015-2018 amounted 43 people.

The essence of the legislative novelty, proposed by the president as an addition to the law “On state duty”, is that citizens of the PMR who are serving a sentence of imprisonment are exempted from paying the state fee for issuing or issuing a passport to replace a worn out or lost passport. The condition is: if their personal account does not have funds for expenses associated with the issuance or execution of the main document for citizens. The funds of the special account of the Ministry of the Interior will be used for this.

In turn, deputies of the relevant parliamentary committee proposed to amend the norms of the law “On State Duty” in the issue of issuing passports, but this time to persons receiving them for the first time. Currently, citizens who receive a passport upon reaching a specified age (16 years) for the first time are exempted from paying the state fee. At the same time, the age limit for exercising the right to obtain a passport for the first time without paying a state fee has not been legally determined. In this regard, law enforcers charge a state fee for obtaining a passport by citizens for the first time if they are over 17 years old. Its size corresponds to the size for issuing or issuing a passport in return for a worn out (lost) - 5 MW. The responsible committee of the Supreme Council on this issue began to receive complaints. The reaction was the development of a bill. Its essence is that citizens who receive a passport are exempted for the first time from paying state duties, regardless of their age.

Members of the Presidium of the Supreme Council scheduled the next plenary meeting to be held on September 24.