The 2nd District Court found the man accused of violating privacy, who installed hidden cameras in the toilets of a medical clinic in the capital, not guilty. “The act is not provided for by the criminal law,” the court found.
Surveillance camera SOURCE Shutterstock
The man was sent to court on the charge that, in the toilets dedicated to doctors and patients at a private clinic in Bucharest, he installed hidden cameras, disguised in two air fresheners, to film the women going to the toilet.
After the discovery of the hidden cameras, the man was placed under preventive arrest and house arrest for two months.
Sent to court, the man was declared innocent because “the act is not provided for by the criminal law”.
The judge who handed down the decision showed in the sentence that the crime of interfering with private life, without right, by photographing, capturing or recording images, listening with technical means or audio recording of a person requires that the recording devices be “in- a dwelling or room or dependence belonging to it or of a private conversation”.
The judge also pointed out that another article of the Criminal Code stipulates that placing, without right, technical means of audio or video recording, for the mentioned purpose, is also a crime.
“In order to fulfill the conditions of objective typicality of the crime of violation of private life in the previous version. of art. 226 para. (1) Penal Code, it is necessary, among other things, that the photographing, capturing or recording of images, listening with technical means or audio recording takes place in relation to a person located in one of the strictly limited spaces provided by the norm of incrimination, respectively in a dwelling or room or dependency belonging to it, that is, in a space that is found in the notion of domicile from a criminal point of view”, the sentence of the 2nd District Court states.
What is a “dwelling”?
The judge also pointed out that, considering the definition of the crime, “deciphering the connotation of the terms home, room and dependence is of particular importance”.
“The court finds that, according to the DEX, the room is defined as a ‹room, room›, and the dependence is defined as an ‹accessory room of a residential house (kitchen, bathroom, etc.)›. Therefore, the court notes that the ordinary meaning of these terms implies a close, indissoluble connection between the residence (‹place, house, building where someone lives or can live›) and the places designated as rooms or outbuildings”, the Court’s sentence states Sector 2, which is not definitive.
The judge also pointed out that “if in the case of the room the connection is closer, this being practically a component of the house, in the case of the dependence, it can be understood as a household annex, a summer kitchen, which, although it is not attached to the house, is in the immediate vicinity of the house”. “The same meaning was given to the terms in question in the doctrine of criminal law,” the judge also pointed out.
Starting from these definitions, the judge established that the toilets of the medical clinic in which the hidden cameras were installed “do not fall under any of these notions, namely dwelling, room and dependence related to dwelling, not being a domicile in the sense of the criminal law, but a room of a professional headquarters”.
The 2nd District Court also justified its decision through a decision of the Constitutional Court from 2017, when the CCR ruled on an exception of the unconstitutionality of the article that refers to the article that defines the violation of private life.
The author of the notification complains that the definition “does not provide the same protection to the fundamental right when the violation of intimate, family and private life is carried out in spaces outside the concept of housing, room or dependency belonging to it, respectively in spaces belonging to public property or in which the activity of institutions or public authorities”.
The CCR then decided that “through the contested regulation, the state does not deny the person’s right to intimate, family and private life, but offers increased protection to anti-social acts that infringe this right, when they are committed in a home or room or dependency related to it “.
Therefore, the 2nd District Court decided that in the case of the hidden cameras installed in the toilets of the medical clinic in Bucharest “the act is not provided for by the criminal law”. The sentence is not final and can be appealed.
2023-08-19 07:00:08
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