The question was not difficult enough: High Court dismisses a referral on the prison allowance

A judge asked for the 20 per cent prison allowance to be counted in his holiday money as well, and the tribunal referred the question to the High Court. The answer came without touching the substance: the question was not difficult enough to deserve a ruling of principle. Decision No. 80 of 22 June 2026 of the Panel for the Resolution of Points of Law, published in the Official Gazette of Romania No. 690 of 20 August 2026, dismisses as inadmissible the referral made by the Alba Tribunal. This is the second time in the same issue of the Official Gazette of Romania that a supreme court closes a file on procedural grounds, after the Constitutional Court also dismissed 47 cases concerning compensation for property taken over abusively.

The question sent by the tribunal was a concrete one. Does the 20 per cent prison allowance, provided for by Article 13 of Annex No. V to Framework Law No. 153/2017 on the remuneration of staff paid from public funds and by Order of the Minister of Justice No. 2.830/C/2017, have the nature of a permanent allowance, which must be taken into account for the holiday pay due for the period of secondment, under the conditions of Article 6 of the Regulation on the leave of judges and prosecutors?

The case on the merits belongs to a judge of the Craiova District Court. The Alba Tribunal, seised of the dispute, took the view that the admissibility conditions were met and set out its own point of view, according to which the allowance is permanent in nature. That is exactly where the High Court stopped.

What it changes in practice

The first effect is that the question is left without a binding answer. There is no ruling of principle that the courts are bound to apply, so each panel hearing a similar claim decides for itself whether the allowance counts towards the holiday pay or not.

The second effect is the most important one in practice and concerns any court, not only pay disputes. The decision restates, by reference to Government Emergency Ordinance No. 62/2024, what a genuine point of law means: a problem that involves serious difficulties of interpretation of legal provisions that are imperfect, incomplete or contradictory, not the interpretation of a clear text applied to the circumstances of one particular dispute, nor mere obstacles that could be removed by more thorough reflection.

The third effect is a requirement of reasoning, stated explicitly. The referring court must show in its order why the rule is complex, doubtful or incomplete, which possible interpretations it weighed and to what extent the difficulty goes beyond the ordinary duty of a judge to interpret and apply the law. A bare statement that the admissibility conditions are met, followed by the court setting out its own opinion, is not enough.

The fourth effect concerns the limits of the mechanism. The Court recalls that it cannot take the place of the judicial function of the trial court, the court that establishes the facts and applies the law in the case before it. The preliminary ruling procedure serves the unification of case-law, not the settlement of one particular dispute.

The fifth effect is the label the Court attaches to this very problem. The Court finds that determining whether the prison allowance is permanent or temporary calls for a simple exercise of legal reasoning, using the usual legal tools, that is to say an ordinary operation that courts deal with all the time. In other words, the tribunal has everything it needs to answer on its own.

What has changed compared with the previous situation

Nothing changes in the regime of the prison allowance. The texts remain those of Framework Law No. 153/2017 and of Order of the Minister of Justice No. 2.830/C/2017, and the way they are applied stays with the trial courts.

Something does change, though, in the way the new procedure is read. The referral was made on the basis of Government Emergency Ordinance No. 62/2024, which replaced the earlier framework in the Code of Civil Procedure for this type of referral. The decision establishes a point of continuity: the earlier case-law of the Panel for the Resolution of Points of Law on the requirement of a genuine point of law remains good law under the ordinance as well, because the same condition appears in Article 2 of the ordinance.

A second marker worth keeping in mind comes from the preamble of the ordinance, quoted by the Court: the measures were designed to clarify difficult points of law at an early stage. Difficulty therefore remains the central criterion, not the mere existence of a question.

For magistrates with cases pending, the practical situation changes only in terms of waiting. Anyone who hoped that a preliminary ruling would settle the matter quickly, in his favour or against him, now has to argue the case on the merits, before the court hearing it. Also in the justice system, another procedural question reached the Constitutional Court: the coordination of trainee prosecutors.

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