Civil Society and Post-communist Transitional Justice in Romania

Abstract

In the only text that examined the impact of state-free groups on the process of reckoning with the communist past in Romania, Grosescu (2007) argued that civil actors “were unable to build coherent methodologies and long-term projects” regarding transitional justice (p. 183). The statement rings true when applied to judicial methods. Nevertheless, Romanian civil society groups have been instrumental in maintaining the need to come to terms with the communist past in the public eye and on the policy agenda, and in proposing key methods designed to redress communist human rights violations. True, during the first two decades of post-communism, these groups faced a general public mainly concerned with its economic survival and political elites preoccupied with their narrow group interests (Atitudini şi opinii despre regimul comunist din România. Sondaj de opinie publică 2012). In addition, as Grosescu (2007) noted, these groups were unable to come together and support common projects, and often criticized each other as much as they criticized state authorities.

This chapter provides an overview of civil society efforts to promote Romanian post-communist transitional justice since 1989 by surveying methods such as lustration (the banning of communist decision makers from post-communist public life), court trials launched against communist perpetrators, ordinary citizens’ access to the files compiled by the secret political police, the Securitate, the presidential history commission, the citizens’ opinion tribunal, property restitution, and memorialization. Whereas most authors working on Eastern Europe have assumed that civil society generally promotes transitional justice, this chapter also discusses state-free groups that have opposed any meaningful reckoning with the recent past.