Today the High Court of Cassation and Justice (ICCJ) will decide whether to uphold the decision to return to the Military Prosecutor’s Office the file of “the Revolution” in which former president Ion Iliescu and former deputy prime minister Gelu Voican Voiculescu are accused of committing crimes against humanity, reports Agerpres.
On May 21, a judge of the preliminary chamber of the Supreme Court decided that the case be returned to the prosecutors, after finding irregularities in the indictment. Military prosecutors and several injured parties challenged the decision, and magistrates will rule on their appeals on Wednesday.
In October 2020, the court excluded several pieces of evidence from the case, with the Military Prosecutor’s Office then having five days to remedy the irregularities in the indictment and to inform the court if it maintains the order to prosecute the defendants or request the restitution of the case. The ICCJ then admitted several requests and exceptions invoked in the Revolution case by both the civil parties and Ion Iliescu and Gelu Voican Voiculescu, excluding several pieces of evidence as a result of the finding of the irregularity of the indictment drawn up by the military prosecutors.
Ion Iliescu, who served as Romania’s president from 1989 to 1996 and again from 2000 until 2004, former prime minister Petre Roman, and former deputy prime minister Gelu Voican Voiculescu were in charge of the Council of the National Salvation Front when anti-regime protests turned violent. Military prosecutors formally indicted Iliescu and Roman for crimes against humanity during the 1989 revolution, which left more than 1,000 dead and 2,500 wounded.
Romania’s violent revolution in December 1989 resulted in the hanging of president Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife Elena on Christmas Day. It was only after the non-violent overthrow of the communist regimes in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and the fall of the Berlin Wall in that same year that Romanians dared to take to the streets and demand for the must-hated communist dictator to step down.
The 1989 revolution and its aftermath have been clouded in controversy. Not only was Romania’s the last and only violent revolt in otherwise peaceful transitions in the Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe — the sequence and actors involved in the downfall of Ceauşescu and the role of former second-rank communists like Iliescu has made many wonder if the revolution was not simply a coup d’état. On several occasions between 1990 and 1992 miners marched on Bucharest to violently quell opposition to Iliescu’s government.
