The Legal Benefits Provided by the Romanian Criminal Legislation in Favor of the Collaborators

In the Romanian criminal process, a collaborator can be any person who does not act as an operative agent within the judicial police and who helps the criminal investigation authorities to obtain data and information in criminal cases for the identification and criminal prosecution of perpetrators, as well as for taking all legal procedural measures in the criminal case (for example, for identifying goods subject to special confiscation). Thus, the collaborators may have the quality of parties or main procedural subjects (defendant, civil party, civilly responsible party, injured person, and suspect) or of other procedural subjects according to the provisions of art. 34 of the Romanian Code of Criminal Procedure, such as the witness. The use of the collaborators, in addition to other special methods of surveillance and investigation provided by the Code of Criminal Procedure, is often essential in the investigation of drug trafficking offenses or other illicit activities carried out by organized criminal groups, given the secrecy of their activity and the difficulty of infiltrating foreigners into the criminal environment. The legal benefits that can be given to collaborators to persuade them to cooperate with criminal investigation authorities in order to gather the data and information necessary to find out the truth in criminal cases and prevent the commission of crimes are the application of a case of impunity or reduction of punishment and financial rewards. However, special attention must be paid to employees' motivations to assess their credibility, both by the criminal investigation authorities and by the court.