BRUSSELS, 4 May. (EUROPE PRESS) –
The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has indicated in its ruling on Thursday that community regulations allow a person to be disqualified from holding any elected public office for a limited time if they have violated the rules on conflict of interest in the exercise of their functions, although the person affected must be able to request control of that sanction by a court, especially with regard to respect for the principle of proportionality.
The sentence comes after the mayor-elect of a municipality in Romania requested the annulment of a report from the National Agency for Integrity that accused him of not having complied with the rules on conflicts of interest in administrative matters, which could deprive him of full right of his mandate with an accessory sanction of disqualification to hold elective public office for three years, in accordance with the Romanian norm.
The mayor-elect then argued that the EU regulations are opposed to a national regulation that imposes this disqualification automatically and without the possibility of modulation depending on the seriousness of the breach committed, to the person who has incurred in a conflict of interest.
The Court of Justice has concluded that the automatic imposition of the sanction makes it possible to put a lasting end to the situation of conflict of interest detected while presenting the functioning of the State and of the elective bodies in question.
In addition, the CJEU has considered that establishing both the full deprivation of the mandate and an automatic disqualification from holding any elective public office for a sufficiently long predetermined period of time seems appropriate to discourage people who exercise an elective mandate from placing themselves in such situation and encourage them to comply with their obligations in the matter.
In this sense, the ruling recalls that Romanian legislation establishes this disqualification for a period of three years, therefore it is limited in time, it only applies to certain categories of people who perform particular functions and it applies only to elective public positions, without impeding the exercise of any other professional activity.
With regard to the proportionate nature of the measure, the Court considers that it is not, in principle, disproportionate in relation to the infringement that it seeks to punish, although it warns that the fact that the duration of this disqualification is not accompanied by any possibility of modulation does not allow to exclude that, in certain exceptional cases, this sanction could be disproportionate.
