Introduction

On October 12, 2010, the European Court of Human Rights (the “ECHR” or the “Court”), issued its first pilot judgment against Romania in a case entitled Maria Atanasiu and Others v. Romania (the “Pilot Judgment”). The judgment itself was not shocking considering the significant number of decisions in the restitution field already decided by the Court against Romania over the past several years. In those decisions, the Court repeatedly sanctioned Romania for its inability to set up an effective restitution and compensation mechanism for the victims of the former communist regime. However, it seemed as though the Romanian authorities simply didn’t care about the Court because they did virtually nothing to remedy the situation for almost a decade.

Law 10/2001 was ostensibly designed to compensate persons whose properties were confiscated by the communist regime. In reality, it was initially meant to be little more than a schmecherie – a ruse in Romanian. The political will to create a genuine restitution scheme was lacking. Even after the 2005 reforms, no meaningful effort was made to induce any serious measure of functionality into the system. Claims languished over many years while claimants died of old age waiting for justice. The whole system of determining the validity of restitution claims was and is bogged down in a bureaucratic maze of indecision and indolence.

Suddenly, thanks to the intervention of the ECHR, the whole situation in Romania must change immediately or Romania will face the untenable effects of the “pilot judgment” against it which are considerable. While the Court had previously recommended to the Romanian state that it remedy the massive procedural problems in validating claims, nothing much happened. Faced with such inactivity and the lack of political will exhibited by the Romanian authorities, the ECHR