News

The new Disciplinary Statute of Workers Fulfilling Public Functions was passed in September. The new Statute targets four major objectives:

• Approximation to the disciplinary system of the common labour system and matching it to the essential vectors of Public Administration reform, in particular with matters arising from the new rules for the formation of the public employment legal relationship;
• Ensuring articulation of disciplinary norms with the relevant legislation passed meanwhile, of which the Code of Administrative Procedure, the Penal Procedure Code and the Labour Code are examples;
• Incorporation of specific simplification measures to administrative procedure, by promoting celerity and avoiding bureaucracy, without prejudice to the safeguarding and reinforcing of individual rights and guarantees;
• Giving expression to the valuing of the role of managers and strengthening their management administrative competences, by granting them competences in matters pertaining to the enforcement of penalties that have previously been fulfilled by members of the Government.

Among the changes introduced in relation to the approximation to the common labour system and the matching to the new systems the following should be highlighted:

• A reduction in the number of disciplinary penalties, only existing reprimand penalties (of a moral nature), fines (of a pecuniary nature), suspension and dismissal due to a fact imputable to the worker (with expulsive nature, applicable to appointed or contracted staff, respectively), being maintained the penalty of termination of limited executive tenure, either as an autonomous penalty or as a penalty attached to or inevitably following on from the main penalty, but exclusively applicable to staff fulfilling management posts;
• The adoption of limits per offence and per year in cases of enforcement of penalties of fine (six basic daily remunerations per offence and a maximum of ninety days basic remuneration per year) and of suspension (twenty to ninety days for each offence, to a maximum of two hundred and forty days per year), adopting a solution identical to the Labour Code, and limiting the effects of all penalties;
• The adoption of a special procedure - an investigative procedure - exclusively intended to ascertain whether two negative performance assessments, obtained in two consecutive years, by a worker on an appointment system or on a limited executive tenure basis (in a non-managerial post) are deemed to be a disciplinary offence for breach of functional duties, namely that of zeal.

As regards simplification and speediness of procedures and the reinforcement of workers's guarantees the following should be highlighted:

• Reduction in the time limit for the lapsing of a disciplinary offence, which will be of one year calculated as from the date of the offence or thirty days calculated as from it being noted by a hierarchical superior;
• The setting of a maximum time limit of eighteen months for the completion of the disciplinary proceedings, calculated as from the date of its starts;
• Reinforcement of the position of an appointed lawyer in disciplinary proceedings, namely with regard to intervention in the interrogation of the defendant, a request for an expert psychiatric report and, in general, exercising all the defendant's rights as recognised by law;
• The prevalence of the preliminary hearing over all the investigator's remaining tasks, who is exclusively assigned to the preliminary hearing of the proceedings;
• The granting of competences to top managers, that cannot be delegated, for the enforcement of all disciplinary penalties above a written reprimand, which has as a consequence that the competence of the members of the Government concerned in matters pertaining to the enforcement of penalties is now to be the responsibility of those to whom they are directly accountable.

Finally, pursuant to legislation meanwhile published and accompanying the change of paradigm on the access to information and administrative documents and the administrative transparency, the functional duty of informing the citizen was stipulated, as opposed to the traditional and overcome duty of secrecy.