President Nicusor Dan said on Thursday, commenting on the Court of Justice of the European Union's (ECHR) ruling on the statute of limitations in Romania, that 'the main responsibility for this situation lies with Parliament.'

'There are several points that need to be made here. The first is that the main responsibility for this situation lies with Parliament. We had a ruling of the Constitutional Court which, if I am not mistaken, should have been followed by legislative action within the constitutional deadline of 45 days - in any case, within the number of days provided for by the Constitution. That legislative correction never took place, despite several years having passed. That is where the problem began.

'Beyond that, law is not an exact science. The administration of justice involves balancing competing legal principles. The Court of Justice had one interpretation, while the High Court had another. Today, or perhaps yesterday, the Court of Justice of the European Union clarified the matter. The rulings of the Court of Justice of the European Union are binding and will be respected in Romania. That is all I can say,' the head of state told a press conference.

The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled on Thursday that the Romanian High Court of Cassation and Justice's decision to extend the application of the statute of limitations in criminal cases to the period 2014-2018 is incompatible with EU law. The ECHR also held that the High Court's ruling on the statute of limitations does not apply to cases that are still pending before the courts.

'The Court points out that, given the importance of the principle of res judicata in EU law, EU law does not require final judicial decisions to be reopened where, in applying the High Court's 2022 ruling, they found that criminal liability for serious fraud affecting the financial interests of the European Union had become time-barred,' the ECHR said.

Specifically, in May 2022, Romania's Constitutional Court issued a ruling concerning the grounds for interrupting limitation periods in criminal matters, which applied to the period between 2018 and 2022.

Subsequently, the High Court ruled that the Constitutional Court's decision also applied retroactively to 2014.

The issue was referred to the ECHR in the 'Lin' case, which resulted in two judgments on limitation periods: Lin I (June 2023) and Lin II (16 July 2026).

The Lin I judgment of 24 July 2023 concerned several Romanian nationals who had been sentenced to prison for tax evasion. They challenged their convictions, arguing that, under the national standard of protection relating to the retroactive application of the more lenient criminal law (lex mitior), their criminal liability had become time-barred.

The applicants relied, on the one hand, on two decisions of Romania's Constitutional Court delivered in 2018 and 2022. Those rulings invalidated a national provision governing the interruption of limitation periods in criminal matters, with the result that, for almost four years, Romanian law provided no grounds for interrupting those limitation periods.

In its Lin II judgment, the CJEU held that the High Court's decision to extend the application of the statute of limitations in criminal cases to the period 2014-2018 is incompatible with EU law.

In response, the High Court of Cassation and Justice said it had 'at all times acted in good faith' in applying European law as a whole and maintained that its approach to the limitation of criminal liability had not amounted to choosing between EU law and the European Convention on Human Rights. AGERPRES (RO - writing by: Georgiana Tanasescu; EN - writing by: Cristina Zaharia)