The application limits of decriminalization in the case of the offence of assimilated smuggling in continued form

Abstract

The legal issues arising from decision no. 176/2022 of the Constitutional Court began to decrease significantly by recognizing the limited continuity of criminalization of the deed previously considered as crime of assimilated smuggling, following the standardization of caselaw in this regard. However, the discussions are far from being exhausted.

An example in this regard is the continued form of the offense of assimilated smuggling, which has put the courts in difficulty in situations where the typical actions of the continued offence do not each exceed the quantitative threshold imposed by the Constitutional Court, and later by the legislator, but only by totaling the amounts of cigarettes that were the material object of the plurality of those actions.

That is why, starting from a final court decision in this matter, we proposed to address the issue of the limits in which the decriminalization already admitted in caselaw can be capitalized on the continued form of the offense of assimilated smuggling, as well as the effects, especially in the case where only some of the actions of the continued form respect the mentioned quantitative threshold.