The Council for the Prevention and Combating of Discrimination, after half a year of work, will decide whether penalties for discrimination should be imposed or not, or the formulation of a recommendation is enough. The Council’s head Oxana Gumennaia said that if they establish that penalties are necessary, they will propose amending the legislation so as to empower the Council with such rights.

“The Council’s functionality is not necessarily related to the imposition of fines. The formulation of recommendations is exactly the stage we need now as society does not yet perceive the situations of discrimination or non-discrimination. We are at only at the beginning,” Council member Doina Ioana Straisteanu has told IPN.

Doina Straisteanu underlined that they want to solve the disputes amicably rather by involving the law enforcement bodies. The Council’s members urge the sides involved in the conflict to cooperate and to follow the recommendations of the Council.

Since the Council for the Prevention and Combating of Discrimination started to work five months ago, it was informed about 16 cases of discrimination on the grounds of language, ethnicity, disability, etc. The Council issued two decisions. It ascertained that a police officer was discriminated because of his opinion at the workplace, while a lawyer discriminated against her client on grounds of his mental disability, depriving him of state guaranteed legal advice. Next week, the Council will pronounce on the case of a student with mental disabilities, who said that she was discriminated by the principal of the school where she studied and by her classmates.