During more than 30 years of Romanian post-communism, the judicial process to find those responsible for the death of Gheorghe Ursu on November 17, 1985 passed through various stages. Although the investigation, at the insistence of the family, began in early 1990, and the prosecutor who led it, Dan Voinea, filed the case in late March of that year, the verdict in the trial against the two security officers who conducted the investigation as at large , as well as during the period when he was in police custody, it was given on the almost 38th anniversary of the dissident’s death^[1].

In July 2023, when the Supreme Court of Cassation and Justice decided, as the highest court, to acquit Marin Parvulescu and Vasile Hodis, accused of the death of a dissident, it seemed that the approach and the entire judicial process in Romania was coming to an end. . But three months later, in October, two civil parties, Olga and Andrii Ursu, the dissident’s children, challenged the verdict through a review action.^[2] – an extraordinary method of attack. The request for review is formulated as motivated by the discovery of new facts and circumstances that were not known at the time of the court’s decision, giving arguments that contradict some of the most important considerations of the motivation, including that Gheorghe Ursu was not a real dissident because his positions were expressed in in narrow circles, not in public space, and in the case of letters sent to Free Europe, the author was not mentioned^[3]. A few days later, the General Prosecutor’s Office submitted another inspection request with an attached series of documents issued by CNSAS, IICCMER and the “Nicolae Iorga” Institute of the Romanian Academy.

On Wednesday, February 21, the Bucharest Court of Appeal will rule on the review request. The stake of the approach, in addition to challenging acquittals and improperly motivated decisions based on the arguments of former security forces who appeared as witnesses, is to get the conviction of the security forces and an honest end to the confrontation in this case, but it is also aimed at the course of the file under the general name ” Procesul communismus”, which now seems to have been forgotten.

Quick reminder: process table

Romania’s post-communist judicial system can hardly explain the delays, but especially the blocking of the proceedings, which took place from one trial to another, with the sole aim of avoiding the guilt of the communist political police in the case of this death. In the first stage, the new prosecutor appointed after the release of Dan Voinei found a fellow inmate, Marian Klite, a common law prisoner, who was used as an informant and brought there to be abused as the sole culprit in the death of a dissident receiving information from Ursu. Never before, in the mid-1990s, Klita was entrusted with such a great responsibility. Finally, all others responsible were excluded from the file, even Klite’s partner, Gheorghe Radu, a prisoner with a similar story. After Klyte’s conviction, the investigation turns to two police officers, Tudor Stenik and Mihai Kryang. In 2003, they were convicted of incitement to murder, and in justifying the sentence, the court confirmed the fact that during the detention, from September 21 to November 17, 1985, all the rights of Gheorghe Ursu were violated, starting from the arrest was an abuse due to the too small amount of currency that was kept and the fact that he was banned from all outside communication with his family and did not benefit from legal assistance during the investigation. The court also supported the fact that the dissident’s death was directly related to the orders they gave both to the prisoners in the cell and to subordinate guards.

Thus, until the mid-2000s, all the cases eluded any other responsible persons involved in the suspicious death of the dissident, although the investigation by prosecutor Dan Voinei from the beginning of 1990 looked at all those involved. After the conviction of two policemen, the case has been closed for more than ten years. The investigation is delayed or stopped, despite the insistence of the family and even the extreme gestures of the dissident’s son Andrii Ursu, who is on hunger strike, in the hope that he will unblock the trial and bring to justice at least the marine officer Pirvulescu, the one who who coordinated the investigation at both stages.

The process of communism

The change in the fate of the case was caused by the decision of the Prosecutor General Tiberiu Nitzu to reopen the investigation and classify the case as a crime against humanity. The resolution of the prosecutor’s office was issued after Andrii Ursu went on hunger strike for the second time in the fall of 2014. The document refutes all decisions on non-infringement of criminal prosecution based on the materials of the “Process over Communism”. Thus, the order dated November 5, 2014 decides to reopen the cases created as a result of complaints and denunciations formulated by the IICCMER (IICCMER, at the date of the order), the parishioners of the Greek Catholic Church united with Rome and the family of the dissident Gheorghe Ursu.

The files that made up the so-called “Trial on Communism” related to actions committed between March 1945 and December 1989, “criminal actions which, in terms of their scale and gravity, the quality of the perpetrators, the way they were committed and the results produced (a large number victims), limited to the content of crimes against peace and humanity, as provided for in the previous Criminal Code, the facts were reported before the entry into force of the new Criminal Code, respectively 02.01.2014”. The reports, some submitted in 2007, condemned “crimes and abuses committed at the behest or instigation of security officers and commanders and officers in charge of the Romanian penitentiary system between March 1945 and December 1989 in furtherance of the repressive aims of the communist regime.” as a result of the investigation and subsequent files, former prison chiefs Alexandru Višinescu and Ion Fichior were convicted of crimes against humanity in 2016 for abuses committed while running the Rimnik-Serat Penitentiary and the Peripravska Labor Colony, respectively. According to a 2014 document, the materials of the so-called “communism trial” include crimes committed between 1945 and 1989, which were classified because of the statute of limitations on murder charges. The document provides a list of facts and categories of citizens who suffered from the repressive measures of the regime of that period, the last paragraph directly refers to “arrests and repressions of the main opponents and dissidents in the 70s and 80s.” _Read the entire article and comment on Contributors.ro