Romanian Senate Vote to Repeal Anti-Fascist Laws Must Be Corrected in the Parliamentary Record, Says Roma Foundation for Europe

Brussels, 15 May 2026 ‒ This week, the human rights committee of the Romanian Senate voted, by majority, to advance L295/2026—a bill that would repeal Romania's principal anti-fascist legislation. The two laws targeted, adopted in 2002 and 2015, prohibit the symbols of the Iron Guard, the interwar Romanian fascist movement and the public glorification of Ion Antonescu, the wartime Romanian leader condemned by a Romanian tribunal in 1946 for war crimes, including the deportation and killing of Roma and Jews during the Second World War.

This committee—the Senate Commission for Human Rights, Equality of Chances, Cults and Minorities—is the body the Romanian Senate has charged with safeguarding precisely the rights at issue. In the document recording its favourable vote, the Commission stated, in its own words, that the bill “directly interferes with fundamental rights: freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, freedom of association, and the principle of equality and non-discrimination—as protected by the Romanian Constitution, the European Convention on Human Rights, and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights”.

“The committee’s own vote document lists the fundamental rights this bill violates,” said Mensur Haliti, Vice President for Democracy at the Roma Foundation for Europe. “Freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, freedom of association, the principle of non-discrimination. That is not our characterisation. It is theirs. And then they voted in favour anyway.”

Later the same day, the President of the Social Democratic Party of Romania—a party whose senators sit on the committee, and which is itself a member of the Socialists and Democrats Group in the European Parliament—stated publicly that he did not know the details of his party's vote. He suggested it may have been a scăpare—an oversight—and committed to correcting the situation urgently, should the information be confirmed.

The Roma Foundation for Europe takes the public commitment at its word.

The commitment was made in a specific context.

The two laws targeted by L295/2026 do not stand alone. They have been strengthened by subsequent legislation—most recently Legea 241/2025, which extended the scope of the 2015 law—and tested at Romania’s Constitutional Court. Legea 241/2025 was submitted to the Court by President Nicuşor Dan, Romania’s head of state, and the Court deemed it constitutional. The bill the Senate Commission advanced on 13 May claims the legislation it seeks to repeal "flagrantly violates the Constitution"—a claim the Court has already adjudicated and rejected. A parliamentary correction in this context is also a correction in relation to the Court's ruling.

These laws are also the legal basis on which active criminal prosecutions are currently proceeding against named public figures in Romania, including Diana Șoșoacă, a far-right senator and former presidential candidate, and Călin Georgescu, the ultranationalist candidate whose first-round victory in the 2024 presidential election was subsequently annulled. The repeal would, in operational effect, nullify those prosecutions. A parliamentary correction in this context is also a correction in relation to criminal accountability for political acts.

The European Commission is the guardian of the Treaties Romania accepted on accession. The European Parliament—including the Socialists and Democrats Group in which the party concerned holds its European membership—is the political family that will, in due course, account for this. The Council of Europe, through the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities and the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance, holds the standing remit to monitor matters of this kind in member states. The OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights includes Romania within its observation. Each of these institutions reads the parliamentary record. None reads a press release as a substitute.

The Roma Foundation for Europe will continue to engage with these institutions and with the relevant authorities in Romania, until either the procedural correction is registered in the parliamentary record or its absence is recorded as a settled European institutional fact.

This Saturday, 16 May, is the Council of Europe‒recognised Roma Resistance Day. It marks 16 May 1944, when Roma prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau refused the order to the gas chambers and fought back with what they could find.

“The democratic standards now in question on the Romanian Senate floor are the standards built, after Auschwitz, to secure Roma membership in European democratic life,” said Haliti. “We expect those standards to hold.”