Romania: Shock as men accused of torture walk free

Politicians and representatives of civil society have reacted with shock to the news that Romania's supreme court, the High Court of Cassation and Justice, has acquitted two former officers of the country's dreaded communist-era secret police force (Securitate) of torturing the dissident Gheorghe Ursu, who died as a result of injuries sustained while in custody in 1985. The ruling is final.

Marin Parvulescu and Vasile Hodis stood accused of the crime of inhuman treatment for having tortured Ursu. The two men said that they had acted on orders from above and in accordance with the law at the time.

Engineer Gheorghe Ursu had come to the attention of the secret police after letters that he had written denouncing the communist regime's superficial and irresponsible restoration of buildings that had been damaged during the devastating earthquake of 1977 were read out on Radio Free Europe in the West. Ursu claimed that corners had been cut on the instructions of the regime in order to save money.

This was not Ursu's only "crime." He was also very critical in his diary of the politics of Romania's dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, and the personality cult that surrounded him. A female colleague, who was later proven to be a Securitate informant, stole his diary and handed it over to the authorities.

Dissident's diaries used against him

Ursu's house was searched, and dozens of journals containing diary entries from 1949 to 1984 were confiscated. Officers also found US$17 (€15.50) in his home — a small sum, but enough to allow the authorities to arrest Ursu and charge him with illegal possession of foreign currency, which was not permitted in communist Romania.

Historians say that it was common practice at the time for authorities to arrest politically troublesome citizens for minor offences such as this.

Private criticism of the Ceausescu regime

The secret service file on Gheorghe Ursu, which was only discovered in 2014, shows that he was determined to do everything in his power to fight Ceausescu's policies. It quotes the following passage from Ursu's diary about Ceausescu and his wife Elena: "If we don't stop them, we are prostituting ourselves morally and will become sycophants under the rule of the madman and the terrorist sow."

He was in custody for two months, and during this time was brutally mistreated by both Securitate officers and his cellmates. Unwilling to abandon his principles or work with the Securitate, he died from the injuries he sustained.

The court's reasons for the judgment

In the court's opinion, the Securitate officers tasked with investigating Ursu at the time did not infringe upon Ursu's rights in an unreasonable manner. It went on to say that from 1965 onwards — in other words, after Ceausescu came to power — the regime no longer systematically persecuted dissidents.

The court also said that Ursu's dissent was questionable because it had not been expressed publicly and was not widely known. It also argued that Ursu had been allowed to travel to the West on numerous occasions — not par for the course in communist Romania.

How was acquittal possible?

A number of factors made the acquittal possible. Firstly, the Bucharest Court of Appeal in 2019 changed the classification of crimes committed by former communist prison staff and Securitate officers from "crimes against humanity" to the crime of "inhuman treatment," which carries lighter sentences.

Secondly, court cases — including the Ursu case — tend to drag on for years and years, which means that it takes a long time for the truth about the horrendous methods employed by the Securitate to come to light and for those responsible to be punished.

Thirdly, the judges in first instance declared that Ursu's resistance to the communist regime had been "insignificant."

'Serious consequences' for Romanian society

The Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile (IICCMER) released a statement saying that the acquittal will have serious consequences for the process of coming to terms with the past in Romania.

Justice Minister Alina Gorghiu said that she would have liked as a "regular citizen of a country for which dictatorship remains a sinister memory and which shattered destinies not to be a witness to the validation of any form of repression, of torture, to the legitimization of instruments of force that obscure fundamental rights and freedoms."

Sadness and consternation

"I feel humiliated by these judges," poet and anti-communist activist Ana Blandiana told DW, adding that the judges "would never have allowed themselves to say that the communist regime had only been criminal up until 1965 if Romania had a law about the denial of communist crimes, just as there is a law against Holocaust denial."

Germina Nagat of Romania's National Council for the Study of Securitate Archives (CNSAS) told DW that "CNSAS records document thousands of cases of severe mistreatment at the hands of the Securitate in the final years of the dictatorship — from arrests under the pretext of petty crimes to the shooting of those who tried to cross the border illegally."

Fear of negative impact on future rulings

Andrei Ursu, son of the murdered dissident and himself a high-profile member of Romania's civil society, told DW that the judges "are in league with the Securitate."

He said that they adopted the arguments made by the witnesses for the accused, three former high-ranking Securitate officers who gave evidence in support of their colleagues. In stark contrast to this, added Ursu, the judges completely ignored statements made by former dissidents, who provided evidence and described the torture to which they had been subjected.

Ursu is convinced that the judges wanted to prove "that the Securitate was no longer violent in the final years of the communist regime." This means, he said, "that we will never again get justice for those who died during the 1989 revolution." It is estimated that over 1,000 people were killed and over 4,000 injured in the dying days of the Ceausescu dictatorship.

Germina Nagat fears that the acquittal of Parvulescu and Hodis could set a precedent for sentencing in other, similar cases, even though, she said, the arguments put forward by the judges "stand in stark contradiction to the events in the last years of the dictatorship that culminated in the 1989 revolution."

The state attorney's office has announced that it will investigate the possibility of extraordinary legal remedies. Andrei Ursu now hopes to bring the case to the European Court of Human Rights.

This article was adapted from the German by Aingeal Flanagan.