Contributors.ro already announced: on May 9, the High Court of Cassation and Justice completed the appeal hearing in the case of torturers Gheorghe Ursu, former security officers Marin Parvulescu and Vasile Hodisha. The verdict will be handed down by a panel consisting of Valerika Voika, the president, Konstantin Epure and Alin Sorin Nicolescu on July 4 of this year (here). A brief overview of the careers of two SBI investigators is here.

Among other crimes against opponents of the regime, the one of which Gheorghe Ursu became a victim has a certain exceptionality. Firstly, because of its cruelty, which was considered visible, therefore demonstrative. The roommates, the security, and the family, who were able to see the wounds on his body, knew about the torture of engineer Ursa. If they wanted the torture of Gheorghe Ursu to remain a secret, the Securitate would have taken care to avoid it and would have found the means.

All the institutional instruments of the communist regime were involved in the murder of Gheorghe Ursu: the doctors and prosecutors who covered it up, the informants in the cell who beat him, the police who detained him, the security personnel who tortured him, and the political leadership at its highest level. who gave the order. Security would not allow the killing of a man who had so many friends in the cultural world (Geo Bogza, Sorin Vieru, Nina Kassian, etc.), whose fate was being questioned by American senators. Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, who were accused and ridiculed to the point of ridicule, decided to kill by torture. magazine the drawer kept by Gheorghe Ursu was confiscated by the Securitate.

The evidence and testimony available today to the investigative and judicial authorities prove in detail that the death of Gheorghe Ursu was deliberate and full of brutality.

Terrible decision of Judge Mihaela Nice, head of the panel of the Bucharest Court of Appeal

Of course, there is something redundant about the qualifier in the subtitle. I use it because Judge Nice’s reasoning hardly admits of any dilution. If it only showed a lack of attitude, it would be “simply” an abhorrent decision. If it only showed professional limitations, it would be “just” embarrassing. However, the vices of his lordship’s thinking concern both the first aspect and the second.

According to Judge Nice, the security service employees would not have behaved inhumanely towards the person killed in prison, would not have caused him severe suffering and damage to his physical or mental integrity, since “observation, informational observation, informational notes, listening to telephone conversations by TO means and correspondence is an activity about which the victim obviously did not know”, since the conducted search of the house had “the consent of the victim”, and “repeated hearings are procedural documents that can be conducted in any criminal proceedings”. (sentence, here)

Cynicism or chaos in thoughts? The life of Gheorghe Ursu did not threaten the security of the Romanian state. The Ministry of Internal Affairs had no reason to monitor him. How can any self-respecting judge talk about the “consent of the victim” to the search under the circumstances and about normal procedural actions in any criminal case?

Not only that, Ms. Nice is distracting by referring to the surveillance of Engineer Ursu, leaving out the main thing, the evidence of his murder by torture. He also likes to chase the victim. According to her, it would be difficult to consider Gheorghe Ursa a real “political dissident”, since under the communist regime he could have left the country. The victim, who had a son legally and finally settled in the USA, “not only was she not fired from her job, but she was only vacationing abroad.” Then you read a sentence from the Address and you can’t believe your eyes: “The victim’s insignificant “opposition” to the communist regime from a person who was previously privileged by this regime for a long time.” .

Was Mrs. Nita supposed to judge that? Were the actions of engineer Ursu, which angered the leadership of the SB and NKR, “real political dissent”? Was the engineer’s opposition “substantial” or not? What if the victim who criticized the regime and sent letters to Radio Free Europe was a privileged member of the system? O God! O God! Her job was to investigate the evidence regarding Ursu’s torture, how he was tortured, why and by whom.

The key to the trial against defendants Marin Parvulescu and Vasile Hodish lies in the interpretation of their acts of torture and murder: do they constitute crimes against humanity and therefore not statutory? At the time when the parties were heard in the Court of Appeal in Bucharest, the Romanian Criminal Code introduced the necessary provisions and, moreover, their application was “worked out” against the two prison directors, Alexandru Višinescu and Ion Ficior. Both were convicted.

However, Judge Michaela Nice talked about acquitting the guilty. In the 1980s, as his lordship asserted, “it can no longer be assumed that there was a clear intention to systematically destroy any adversary on the part of the state authorities.” In order to speak of crimes against humanity, systematic extermination “must be politically motivated” or systematic extermination of prisoners under common law is unthinkable. At the time, the policy of the Romanian state “was not to suppress the forces of opposition to the political regime and the state leader by means of violence“.

Because of these considerations, the judge of the Bucharest Court of Appeal agrees with the twisted security thesis that the detention and investigation of Gheorghe Ursu would have been motivated by acts of common law. He then describes crimes against humanity in exaggerated terms (eg destruction of any enemy) to deny their validity in the case of Ursu. Third: he adopts the thesis of former security guards about the Securitate’s renunciation of violence in the 1980s.

I quote Art. 439 of the Criminal Code, item 1 e) of Art. 439, which includes in the category of crimes against humanity “torture of a person who is under the guardianship of the perpetrator or over whom he controls in any other way, causing him physical or mental harm or serious physical or mental suffering that exceeds the consequences of sanctions allowed by international right”.

The second paragraph (Article 439, Clause 1 h) strengthens the connection between an individual case and institutionalized collective repression in the sense of a crime against humanity, which consists in “causing the enforced disappearance of a person with the aim of removing him from the protection of the law for a long period of time through kidnapping, arrest or detention at the behest of a state or political organization or with their permission, support or consent, followed by a refusal to admit that the person is deprived of liberty or to provide true information about the fate reserved for him or about his whereabouts as soon as this information will be requested.”

These two paragraphs perfectly describe what happened to Gheorghe Ursu. He became the victim of a crime against humanity, the statute of limitations does not apply. The fact that the victim did not disappear, but was taken dead from the penitentiary in Rahov, is irrelevant.-Read the full article and comment on Contributors.ro