Romania might face an infringement procedure from the European Commission (EC) if the Institute for the Protection of Minority Rights (IPMR) is able to prove that the Hungarian minority was subjected to a violation of rights on a systemic level during the 1989 Romanian re-nationalization, Ágoston Köröm, colleague of the Budapest-based institute said on M1 this weekend (via Transindex).
Köröm said that in order to prove the aforementioned violation of rights, the EC asked organizations to analyze the violations around Romanian re-nationalization and compensations.
The European Parliament’s petition committee recently accepted the IPMR’s petition from January, which talks in detail about the violations. According to the submitted document, the legislation, as well as the administrative and judicial practice related to restitution of property in Romania, conflicts with free movement of capital, the procedural rights related to it, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU, and the general principles of EU law. The petition’s author, György Csóti (director of the Institute for the Protection of Minority Rights), argues that the legislation and practice in question have a discriminatory effect on EU citizens, based on their place of residence and citizenship, and calls on the EU institutions to find a solution to alleviate this effect.
The IPMR asked the European Commission’s petition committee to send a fact-finding committee to investigate the re-nationalization matters and, based on their findings, ask the institutions of the EU to address the violations the minorities were subjected to.
