─Radu Cornea, independent researcher; LLB University of Groningen, LLM Maastricht University

Romania’s highest courts have been scathingly rebuked in the recent Lin II judgment by the Court of Justice of the European Union for a series of decisions that created a pervasive climate of impunity. The European Commission’s 2026 Rule of Law Report noted alarming deficiencies in the judicial system as well. The regressions highlighted by the EU institutions are the aftereffects of a kleptocratic establishment that has successfully entrenched itself and is preventing meaningful reforms. What follows is a concise chronicle of how and why Romania’s judiciary has ended up serving this establishment over the republic.

Beginnings are Delicate Times

The plight in which Romania’s judicial system finds itself at the moment has its origins in the immediate aftermath of the 1989 Revolution. That Revolution, while successful in casting communism off, failed to bring about an all-compassing rejuvenation of political life, in the sense of facilitating genuine participation by citizens in public affairs and ostracizing the enablers and supporters of the communist regime. In its wake, political power was captured by the National Salvation Front, made up of apparatchiks and backbenchers of the former regime. Consequently, state institutions and establishment politicians continued to demonstrate disgust towards essential elements of healthy democratic republics, such as accountability, restraint, transparency, and anticorruption. What prevented the fledgling Romanian republic from meeting an early demise in the 1990s was the return of pro-democracy exiles from the United Kingdom, France, and Switzerland, outrage in the streets, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and international support during critical moments.

Romania’s accession to NATO in 2004 and the European Union in 2007, both organizations that are founded on the values and principles that inspired Romanians to rise up in 1989, symbolized an instance of renewal and innovation. One of the requirements that had to be met before accession to the European Union could materialize was a much-needed reform of the justice system, specifically its anticorruption framework. The National Anticorruption Directorate (DNA) was established in 2005, followed in by the National Agency for Integrity (ANI) in 2007.

In 2013, current European Chief Prosecutor Laura Codruța Kövesi was appointed Chief Prosecutor of the National Anticorruption Directorate, after having served as Romania’s Prosecutor General between 2006-2012. Under her leadership, the National Anticorruption Directorate achieved monumental successes, regularly securing the condemnation of various functionaries, mayors, lawyers, ministers, magistrates, members of parliament, and businessmen for corruption offences. During her tenure, DNA became one of the most trusted public bodies by the Romanian citizens, revelling in 2015 in the trust of 60% of the population, as compared to the Romanian parliament, which was trusted only by 11% of the people.

Entropy Increases

While the public was rejoicing at the DNA’s effectiveness, the beneficiaries of the labyrinthine establishment system set up by the National Salvation Front and maintained by its successor parties, were facing a grim future. Architecturally speaking, this system rests upon a foundation of widespread corruption, unaccountability, and nontransparency in order to secure perpetual control over the state apparatus. Since the DNA was essentially digging at its roots, a smear campaign against Kövesi was launched. Additionally, following the 2016 parliamentary election with an extremely low voter turnout of 39.5%, the Social Democratic Party (PSD), the main successor of the National Salvation Front, emerged with a score of 45%, being thus in the position to easily form a ruling majority. This majority allowed PSD to introduce two measures aimed at maintaining a judiciary whose principal purpose is not upholding the rule of law, nor preventing domination, but the protection of the entrenched kleptocratic system and its beneficiaries.

One measure came in the form of a report authored by the Justice Minister on the managerial activity of the DNA, an unsophisticated hatchet job meant to justify Kövesi’s removal from the position of Chief Prosecutor. According to the law in place at that time in early 2018, after the Justice Minister’s removal proposal, the Superior Council of Magistracy had to provide its opinion, with the final decision falling to Romania’s President. The Superior Council of Magistracy assessed the proposal negatively, while the President refused to sign the proposal. Following this rejection, the Justice Minister, using the Office of the Prime Minister, as proxy, seized Romania’s Constitutional Court (RCC) on an alleged constitutional conflict between himself and the President – even though Article 146(e) Romanian Constitution does not nominate the Justice Minister as a public authority capable of being part of a constitutional conflict. In Decision 358/2018, the RCC dubiously found that the Justice Minister is in fact such a public authority. Additionally, it considered the President’s refusal to sign as a failure to act, conferring in practice exclusively upon the Justice Minister the competence of removing the Chief Prosecutor.

The other measure concerned the setting up of a special Section for Investigating Criminal Offences Within the Judiciary (SIIJ). Enjoying exclusive competence over crimes alleged to have been committed by prosecutors and judges, the SIIJ was employed as an intimidation and suppression mechanism, targeting magistrates who threatened the unreformed state machinery and its beneficiaries with investigations. The SIIJ functioned between 2018-2022, and was abolished following the judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union in Asociația ’Forumul Judecătorilor din România and Others’, where the Court determined that specialized prosecutorial sections acting as instruments of political pressure, incapable of objectivity, and deliberately undermanned as to prevent cases being heard within a reasonable time are incompatible with the provisions that underpin the Union’s adherence to the rule of law, judicial independence, and the sound administration of justice, namely Articles 2 and 19(1) of the Treaty on European Union (TEU).

With the DNA neutralized through the Justice Minister’s decapitation strike and magistrates strong-armed by the SIIJ, the momentum in the fight against corruption and rule of law erosion was faltering heavily. However, facing increasing criticism at European level, the patrons of the murky establishment system, understood here as politicians from parties that had monopolized the post-1989 political scene and high-level magistrates and bureaucrats, adopted a more covert approach in their pursuit of generalized impunity.

Thus, in 2022, the Romanian Constitutional Court delivered Decision 358/2022. This Decision was a follow-up to Decision 297/2018, in which it declared the legal provision in the Penal Code providing for the interruption of the prescriptive period for criminal liability through the performance of any procedural act unconstitutional. Importantly, the RCC did not clearly state the nature of the unconstitutionality finding. Was it extreme, in the sense of leading to the provision losing its legal effects, or was it interpretative, in the sense of still producing legal effects, but needing to be interpreted in a certain way? Until Decision 358/2022, mainstream opinion had been that it was interpretative. In Decision 358/2022, the RCC revealed that it had been an extreme finding of unconstitutionality. This, coupled with the inaction of the legislature since Decision 297/2018, meant that during 2018-2022 interruptions of the prescriptive period for criminal liability had been unlawful. Subsequently, this period was extended by the Romanian High Court of Cassation and Justice to when the unconstitutional provision on the interruption of the prescriptive period had first been introduced, the year 2014. In practice, this amounted to a massive regression in the fight against impunity, enabling criminals under investigation to run the clock and escape prosecution by using stalling tactics, and those already in prison to challenge their sentence through extraordinary appeals.

Furthermore, a new set of laws was adopted in 2022, pertaining to the organization and functioning of the judiciary. The laws continue the establishment’s campaign, started in 2017, of hijacking the justice system through institutional deterioration. A faction of magistrates loyal to the establishment system now controls the High Court of Cassation and Justice, as well as the Superior Council of Magistracy and a number of lower courts in and around Bucharest. This control has been achieved through excessive centralization, elimination of competition, and bureaucratic manipulation.

System Shock

At the end of 2025, the independent investigative outlet Recorder released a devastating documentary titled Captured Justice in which it shed light on this loyalist faction and featured testimonies of magistrates committed to constitutional democracy and the rule of law. The documentary sparked intense debates on, and calls for, a sincere overhaul of the justice system. In June 2026, the Superior Council of Magistracy released Ruling 1348/2026 as response, in which it held that this had amounted to an “unprecedented offensive” against the judiciary, “a veritable coup d’etat”, blacklisting Recorder, alongside Radio Free Europe, numerous members of reformist parties, journalists, magistrates, reputable NGOs, and other media outlets.

What Ruling 1348/2026 of the Superior Council of Magistracy represents is an admission of desperation. Desperation was also what drove the kleptocratic establishment system to topple the Bolojan cabinet in May 2026 for accommodating undesirable reformist political forces that pushed for the reorganization of state-owned undertakings. Having chosen political and institutional corruption as its foundation, the post-1989 establishment is now reaping the whirlwind and is unable to stop its own decay. Lin II and the 2026 Commission Rule of Law Report on Romania delivered further blows by exposing the system’s demagogueries and derelictions. As its decay accelerates, the system is starting to radicalize and autocratize. The past chronicled here is increasingly looking like prologue to a new rule of law crisis within the European Union.

Suggested citation: Radu Cornea, Romania’s Judiciary in Crisis, Int’l J. Const. L. Blog, Aug. 28, 2026, at: http://www.iconnectblog.com/romanias-judiciary-in-crisis/