In brief
- A firefighter from Buzău asked to be paid for the overtime he worked between 2018 and 2021 and says his employer „compensated” it with time off that overlapped the 48 hours of rest following the 24-hour shift.
- The Buzău County Court asked the High Court whether an internal procedure of the Inspectorate for Emergency Situations may lay down such a thing, and the High Court dismissed the question as inadmissible.
- The reason: the referring court did not show why the matter is difficult, and the question did not concern the interpretation of the law but its application to the claimant’s own circumstances. That remains the county court’s business.
Published: Official Gazette of Romania (Monitorul Oficial) no. 723 of 28 August 2026
Delivered: 22 June 2026
A fire service non-commissioned officer went to court for the hours he worked beyond his schedule between 2018 and 2021, and his case sat for three and a half years until the judge decided to ask the High Court how the law applies. The answer came six months later and says the question should not have been put. Decision no. 78 of 22 June 2026 of the Panel for the Resolution of Points of Law dismisses as inadmissible the referral from the Buzău County Court. It is the second dismissal of this kind in a short series: with the very next number, the High Court refused, for the same reason, a referral about the pay of staff paid from public funds.
The preliminary ruling on a point of law is a mechanism by which a judge faced with an unclear provision halts the proceedings and asks the supreme court for a ruling of principle, binding on all courts. Its purpose is to prevent divergent practice, that is, the situation in which the same law receives different solutions around the country.
The decision is binding under Article 521(3) of the Code of Civil Procedure, but what is binding here is only what the High Court decided: that the referral did not meet the conditions. On the merits, the question stays without a ruling of principle.
On 28 August 2026 the Prime Minister signed three personnel decisions taking effect at three different moments: Decisions no. 291, no. 292 and no. 293/2026, from immediate effect to 45 days.
What it changes in practice
The first effect is that the case goes back to the Buzău County Court, and the county court has to decide it on its own. The High Court says plainly that the courts hearing the case are fully competent to examine whether or not the inspectorate’s internal procedure breaches the right to rest, without a ruling of principle.
The second effect is that a limit is set for a new mechanism. Government Emergency Ordinance no. 62/2024 created a special route of referral for cases about the pay of staff paid from public funds and about social insurance benefits. The county court read the provision as meaning that a referral is mandatory whenever a point of law arises on which the High Court has not ruled. The High Court rejected that reading.
The third effect is the definition of what a point of law means here. The supreme court restates its settled case-law: the object of the procedure is an incomplete or unclear rule, a provision which, through serious legal argument, may receive divergent meanings and applications in almost identical situations. The mere entry into force of the emergency ordinance, without a real problem of law, does not justify a referral.
The fourth effect concerns what the referral order has to contain. It has to show the difficulty of the matter, by setting out the different interpretations it may give rise to, the relevant elements of fact and of law in the dispute, and the arguments showing that the problem is genuine and essential for the decision on the merits. The High Court makes clear that it cannot take the place of the referring court in identifying and stating the point of law.
The fifth effect is the classification given to the actual question. The supreme court finds that the question does not concern any uncertainty about the meaning or scope of the rule, but „rather guidance on how to manage the disposal of the case”, that is, a specific answer to the question whether the method of compensation in Procedure PO-56-DF breaches the right to rest in the case of that claimant. Applying the law to the facts is the exclusive attribute of the court hearing the case, and that jurisdiction cannot be delegated.
The sixth effect is a clarification useful to any court that might wish to make a referral: the duty to refer, under Article 2 of the ordinance, is triggered only after the judge himself checks and finds that the problem is real and genuine. The mandatory nature of the referral does not remove the prior check, it presupposes it.
The seventh effect concerns what was not in dispute. The High Court confirmed that the case falls within the scope of the ordinance, since it is about pay entitlements of staff paid from public funds, whatever the standing of the parties and whichever court has jurisdiction. The conditions in Articles 1 and 3 were met; only the condition in Article 2 failed.
What has changed compared with the previous situation
In law, no provision changes. System procedure PO-56-DF remains in force within the inspectorate, Article 21 of Framework Law no. 153/2017 and Article 35 of Emergency Ordinance no. 114/2018 stay as they are, and so does Order of the Minister of Internal Affairs no. 35/2019.
What has changed is the practical meaning of Government Emergency Ordinance no. 62/2024. Its wording sounds mandatory, and the county court read it as an automatic duty. The decision establishes the opposite: the mechanism is not triggered in any situation where a matter arises that the supreme court has not settled, but only where the problem has the features required by the case-law developed on Articles 519 to 521 of the Code of Civil Procedure, novelty apart.
What is expected of a referral order in pay matters for public employees has changed as well. It is no longer enough to reproduce the subject matter of the action and the applicable provisions; the threshold of difficulty of the question has to be shown, and the extent to which it goes beyond the court’s ordinary duty to interpret and apply the law.
Finally, it has been made clear that the admissibility conditions are checked on the basis of the special provisions of the ordinance, supplemented by those of the Code of Civil Procedure, under Article 4 of the ordinance.
Advantages and disadvantages
What it improves
- The supreme court closes off a reading that would have turned the mechanism into an automatic safety valve, with hundreds of referrals in public pay matters.
- The decision says concretely what a referral order has to contain, so judges have a benchmark they can check before suspending a case.
- It is confirmed that cases brought by military personnel over pay entitlements fall within the scope of the ordinance, whatever the standing of the parties and whichever court has jurisdiction.
- It is restated that applying the law to the facts stays with the judge hearing the case, which avoids moving the decision away from the court that took the evidence.
- The reasoning is explicit that the applicable law is neither unclear nor incomplete, which helps the county court when it rules on the merits.
- The referral was disposed of in a little over six months from the order of the Buzău County Court, a short period for this mechanism.
What remains a problem
- The substantive question, whether overtime may be compensated with time off that overlaps the rest following a shift, remains without a uniform answer.
- The claimant had been waiting since April 2022, and the referral added another six months to a case that has come no closer to a decision.
- Procedure PO-56-DF is an internal administrative act of the inspectorate, which is not published, so not even those it applies to can compare it with the law.
- The practice of the courts was not consulted and no relevant case-law was identified, so it is not known whether the problem arises in other counties as well.
- The wording of the emergency ordinance remains the one that caused the confusion, and the decision corrects it by interpretation, not by amending the text.
- The decision was signed by a judge other than the one who presided over the panel, because the presiding judge had in the meantime been removed from office on retirement.
Practical advice
- If you work 24-hour shifts and claim payment for overtime, ask the court to examine on the merits whether the time off granted overlapped your daily and weekly rest. The High Court has confirmed that the county court has jurisdiction to make that analysis.
- Ask in court for the attendance records drawn up at unit level, not only your own records. The claimant in this case relied on the records of the fire station as well as his own.
- Claim the increments that go with the unrecognised hours where applicable: the night work increment, the standby increment and the increment for difficult and toxic conditions. They are claimed separately from the hours themselves.
- If you are a lawyer or a judge preparing a referral to the High Court, set out in the order the divergent interpretations that are possible and the threshold of difficulty of the question. Without them, the referral is dismissed as inadmissible.
- Do not frame the question as a request for the solution in your own case. The High Court dismissed the referral precisely because the question sought, in the particular context of the case, to settle the solution the county court was about to give.
- Check first whether the High Court has already ruled and whether an appeal in the interest of the law is pending. These are separate admissibility conditions, checked cumulatively.
Frequently asked questions
What did the High Court decide in the end?
What happens to the case of the firefighter from Buzău?
Is the decision binding on the courts?
What is Procedure PO-56-DF?
When is a referral to the High Court mandatory in public employees’ cases?
Why is the decision signed by someone other than the presiding judge?
Editorial analysis
The decision is right on its procedural ground, and the central argument is solid: if every question the supreme court has not yet settled required a referral, the mechanism would block itself, and the cases the ordinance meant to speed up would sit even longer. The supreme court is defending here a line it has held for years, that it does not take the place of the judge hearing the case. The problem is not the outcome, but what it leaves behind.
What does not show when you read the decision from cover to cover appears when you reconstruct the timetable of the case from the dates scattered through it. The claimant sought entitlements for the period 5 June 2018 to 22 December 2021, the date on which his employment with the inspectorate ended. He brought the action on 8 April 2022. The county court raised the question of a referral to the High Court only at the hearing of 10 December 2025 and ordered it by the interlocutory judgment of 16 December 2025, that is, three years and eight months after the claim was registered. The answer came on 22 June 2026 and was published on 28 August 2026. A man who worked 24-hour shifts in 2018 will learn, at best in 2027, whether the money was due to him, and his case is only now going back to the first-instance court for a decision on the merits.
The second observation concerns a gap the decision flags without dealing with it. In the chapter on the case-law of the courts, the High Court writes that, given the subject of the referral, it was not necessary to consult the courts on relevant judicial practice, and in the next chapter, that no relevant case-law of the High Court or of the Constitutional Court was identified. In other words, nobody checked whether the problem arises in other inspectorates as well. Procedure PO-56-DF is not an isolated act: it is a system procedure, so it applies uniformly. If its method of calculation were wrong, the error would not concern one firefighter in Buzău but every firefighter working under the same regime.
The third comes from the nature of the act challenged. The claimant contests an internal administrative act, a system procedure, against the Constitution and the Labour Code. Such an act is not published in the Official Gazette of Romania and has no separate route of challenge that an employee could follow simply. The result is that the only way of testing it in law is an individual pay case, that is, exactly the procedure the 2024 ordinance is trying to relieve. The decision closes off, rightly, a procedural loophole, but the substantive problem stays where it was: in an internal document that those it applies to cannot compare with the law other than in court, one by one.
What should be changed
- Clarifying in the text the mandatory nature of the referral under Article 2 of Government Emergency Ordinance no. 62/2024. The current wording produced exactly the reading the High Court had to overturn; an express statement that a referral presupposes a prior check of difficulty would prevent a repeat.
- Publishing the system procedures that lay down working and rest time. An internal procedure that decides when a firefighter rests affects a constitutional right and ought to be accessible to those it applies to.
- Consulting the courts before ruling on inadmissibility, where the act concerned applies nationally. Here it was not checked whether the same procedure has generated litigation in other counties, although it applies uniformly across all inspectorates.
- A deadline for raising the question of a referral. The county court decided to ask the supreme court after three years and eight months of proceedings; if the question was necessary, it was necessary in 2022 as well.
- An administrative check on whether internal procedures are compatible with the rules on rest. It would be cheaper than one case per employee and would answer exactly the question that neither the county court nor the supreme court has settled.
Original text of the legal act
The text below is reproduced in Romanian, the official form of publication.
The full text, as published in the Official Gazette of Romania
Official Gazette of Romania no. 723 of 28 August 2026 16 pages PDF, 119 KB the act starts on page 12
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This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. For specific situations, consult a licensed attorney or tax advisor.