Policy Observatory

On 16 September 2014, the Romanian Constitutional Court declared the law on registering prepay sim card users and public Wi-Fi users unconstitutional. After being adopted in an emergency procedure, several NGOs put pressure on decision makers (including in a letter addressed to the President) to declare this law unconstitutional signaling the serious infringements on private life. The law was brought to the Constitutional Court by the Ombudsman and ApTI together with AADOR-CH intervened via an amicus curiae. in the last 3 years, this law is the 4th attempt to adopt such legislation in Romania.

Today, 8 January 2015, the Ministry for Information Society called an inter-institutional working group to urgently analyze CJUE data retention decision’s impact on national law. Using the terrorist attacks in France as pretext, Romanian authorities are pushing for the urgent adoption of a package of mass surveillance measures which violate fundamental rights.

This comes in the context of the Parliament's unanimous vote on the Law on cybersecurity which states that 'owners of a cyber infrastructure' (basically every legal person with a computer) needs to allow access to data at the simple demand of 9 different Romanian security and intelligence agencies. The cybersecurity law was sent to the Constitutional Court on the 23rd of December 2014.

So far, the Romanian Constitutional Court declared the data retention law unconstitutional two times. The last decision was on the 8th of July 2015 (see some remarks in English here and in Romanian here). At the same time, the Court also declared unconstitutional the law for registering pre-pay SIM cards and Wi-Fi users by Decision no. 461 of 16 September 2014 (available here in Romanian). This was the 4th attempt to introduce this kind of law in the last 3 years.

Civil society and private parties are left out of any discussion.