Civil conventions outlawed

The Labour Ministry may have announced the civil conventions are no longer legal as of March 1, 2003, according to the new Labour Code, but some lawyers and legal counsellors argue that they still are.
“The civil conventions are not legally gone, they are only gone as far as the authorities are concerned,” Magda Volonciu, Azomures lawyer on Wednesday told the “News in the new Labour Code” conference.
She says the Code does not expressly outlaw the provisions of Law 130/1999 on protective measures for employees.
Marius Alexe, legal advisor of the Cartel Alfa union organisation says maintaining or even concluding new such conventions is fully justified by the freedom of will exerted in closing a contract. He argues the abrogation did not actually occur because the provisions of Law 24/2000 on legislative technique norms used for drafting normative acts prevented it. This law, he explains, stipulates that in order to abrogate specific legal provisions, they have to be expressly determined by mentioning all the data that identify them. Furthermore, he added the Constitutional Court had recently ruled on an article in Law 30/1999 and could not have done this unless the normative act in question was still in force.
Those attending the conference asked the Labour Ministry representative Oana Cazan, head of the Legal Department of the Ministry, to provide the necessary clarifications in this regard.
“The official position of the Ministry on this issue is that these civil conventions ceased to exist as employment contracts on March 1. The conventions are therefore removed by Article 298 in the Labour Code,” Cazan said without making any further comment.
Article 298 in the Labour Code specifies that the enforcement of the Code abrogates a series of normative acts but does not expressly mention Law 130/1999, which falls into the “unless otherwise stipulated” category.
The Labour Ministry came back with more clarifications yesterday, stressing civil conventions had indeed ceased to exist as legal employment contracts and therefore may no longer be concluded.