Introduction

What can be said of a Parliament that favors the holders of stolen property over the victims of the theft? Are the victims of human rights abuses in Romania less significant than their abusers? Should the possessor of stolen property in Romania have greater rights to possession or compensation than the actual owners of the property? Are not the answers to these questions self-evident, even in Romania? Undoubtedly, but apparently not to the overwhelming majority of Romanian Parliamentarians who just adopted new amendments to Romania’s Restitution Law 10/2001 (“Law 10”), granting rights to certain buildings and land abusively confiscated by the communist regime to persons who knowingly took possession of them, by striping away any right to the return of those properties to their rightful owners (proposed Law no. 891/17.12.2007 (hereinafter “the proposed law”)). In the topsy-turvy world of Romania’s Parliament, converters of land and buildings have been granted greater rights than the victims from whom they were taken.

Law 10 has as its purpose the restitution to the rightful owners of all buildings and land confiscated by the communist regime, but the sole purpose of the proposed law is the protection of the persons who bought apartments in confiscated buildings on the basis of Law 112/1995. That law was an abomination that provided windfall opportunities to persons who had knowingly occupied stolen property without providing any relief whatsoever to the persons from whom it was stolen. Twelve years later, rather than rectifying this outrage, Parliament has embraced it, codified it, and extolled it at the expense of the victims of communism.

There is nothing ignoble in seeking some form of reasonable protection for people living in apartments that were wrongfully sold to them by the post-communist government. There are numerous