In brief
- A police officer investigated for misconduct committed during a state of emergency may be punished without the file ever passing before the disciplinary board, and the Constitutional Court has confirmed that the rule is constitutional. Decision no. 590 of 11 November 2025 was published on 23 September 2026 and is final and generally binding from that date. The plea was rejected unanimously.
- The officer who was punished loses, and the argument rejected is the very one based on the rights of the defence. The Court answered that the right can still be exercised in the preliminary investigation and that the text restricts only part of the additional safeguards of the procedure. The Pro Lex National Trade Union, which raised the plea on behalf of one of its members, can no longer rely on this ground in the cases still pending.
- What is left to the punished officer belongs to the facts, not to the Constitution. The constitutional court said expressly that a refusal to hear certain persons or to take certain evidence during the disciplinary investigation is a question of the application of the law, falling exclusively to the trial court. For penalties imposed in these periods, the law sends the challenge straight to the administrative court.
Published: Official Gazette of Romania no. 807 of 23 September 2026
In force from: the decision is generally binding from the date of publication, 23 September 2026
The Constitutional Court unanimously rejected the plea raised by the Pro Lex National Trade Union of Bucharest, on behalf of its member Marius Bucătaru, against Article 584(2) of Law no. 360/2002 on the Status of Police Officers. It is the second decision in recent months by which the constitutional court leaves untouched the way disciplinary liability is built for a profession with a statute of its own, after the one holding that a magistrate can no longer be punished more than two years after the act. The contested text is reproduced in the decision itself and reads: „By way of exception to the provisions of paragraph (1), for disciplinary misconduct committed during a state of emergency, a state of siege, mobilisation or in time of war, the disciplinary penalties laid down in Article 58(1) shall be imposed after the preliminary investigation has been carried out, without consulting the disciplinary board.”
The general rule, written in the paragraph just before the contested one, is that disciplinary penalties for police officers are established and ordered only after a preliminary investigation and after the disciplinary board has been consulted. Only the two light penalties are outside it, the warning and the written reprimand. For the rest, that is the postponement of promotion to a higher professional rank or post for 1 to 3 years, the move to a lower post and dismissal from the police, the board must be consulted. Paragraph (2) removes that stage for misconduct committed in four expressly named situations: a state of emergency, a state of siege, mobilisation and time of war.
The text is not an old one. It was introduced into the Status of Police Officers by Article II(7) of Government Emergency Ordinance no. 36/2020, published in the Official Gazette of Romania no. 268 of 31 March 2020, that is in the first days of the state of emergency declared by Decree no. 195/2020. The ordinance was approved by Law no. 30/2021, published in the Official Gazette of Romania no. 258 of 15 March 2021.
The case that produced the plea comes from the same period. A police officer was punished by an order of the General Police Directorate of the Municipality of Bucharest, challenged it before the courts, and the case reached the appeal on a point of law before the Craiova Court of Appeal, Division for administrative and tax litigation, in case no. 4.588/63/2020. There the trade union raised the plea of unconstitutionality, and the court referred it on by the interlocutory order of 10 March 2021. At the Constitutional Court the case received file number 1.130D/2021. The Presidents of the two Chambers of Parliament, the Government and the Ombudsman sent no point of view.
The criticism had a precise form, and its precision matters for what followed. The trade union attacked the text in a conditional formula: it would be unconstitutional in so far as it is read as allowing penalties to be imposed without the board for acts committed during the state of emergency, where the preliminary investigation and the penalty itself came after the state of emergency had ended. The grounds invoked were Article 24 of the Constitution, the rights of the defence, and Article 53, which lays down the conditions under which the exercise of a right may be restricted.
What it changes in practice
The decision is final and generally binding from publication, that is from 23 September 2026. The basis is Article 147(4) of the Constitution, invoked in the operative part of the decision alongside Article 146(d): the binding force of the Court’s decisions hangs on the moment of publication in the Official Gazette of Romania. The rule on when laws and ordinances enter into force is a different one.
The first effect is felt by the case from which everything started. The appeal before the Craiova Court of Appeal goes on with the text left standing as it was written. The punished officer can still put forward any defence on the facts, for instance that the evidence he asked for was necessary or that the act never took place, but he can no longer argue that the absence of the disciplinary board is, in itself, unconstitutional.
The second effect concerns anyone in the same position today. Police officers investigated for misconduct committed during the 2020 state of emergency, whose files have reached the courts, are left without this ground. The wording of the operative part is narrow, though: the text is constitutional „in relation to the criticisms formulated”, so a different criticism, built on other articles of the Constitution, is not closed off by this decision.
The third effect is the one that concerns the future, because the text stays in Law no. 360/2002 and the decision finds no repeal of it. It covers any state of emergency, state of siege, mobilisation or state of war yet to be declared, beyond the one of 2020. What has been confirmed is therefore a standby disciplinary regime, ready to switch on at the next situation of this kind.
The fourth effect is a boundary of jurisdiction, stated by the Court in the last paragraph of its reasoning. The claims about the refusal to hear certain persons or to examine certain evidence in the course of the disciplinary investigation are, in the wording of the decision, matters concerning the application of the law, whose verification falls exclusively to the trial court. It is, in practice, the map of what is left to the punished officer: the same complaints, moved from the Constitutional Court to the administrative court.
What has changed compared with the previous situation
Until March 2020, the Status of Police Officers knew no such exception. Any penalty heavier than the written reprimand required the file to pass before the disciplinary board, whatever the circumstances in which the act had been committed. Government Emergency Ordinance no. 36/2020 added the regime for exceptional situations, and the reason given at the time, taken up in the decision from the explanatory memorandum to the approving law, was the speed of the disciplinary procedure and the need for rules with a preventive role in such periods.
What disappears along with the consultation of the board is best seen from the description given by the decision itself. The disciplinary board is a collective body of legal and professional analysis, which summons the officer under investigation, assesses the evidence taken, hears persons, takes evidence and checks documents, may ask for clarification from the officer who carried out the investigation and deliberates on the case. What is more, its findings on the existence of the misconduct and on fault are binding on the person who imposes the penalty; only the proposal on the penalty itself is advisory. What is lost, therefore, is not an opinion for form’s sake, but the only stage in which someone other than the author of the investigation rules, bindingly, on fault.
The second change, less noticed, concerns who decides at the end. The general rule provides that, after the preliminary investigation, the file is put before the person who ordered it, and that person may close the file, send it back to be completed, impose one of the light penalties or refer the matter to the board. For misconduct committed during a state of emergency, a state of siege, mobilisation or war, a second text in the same law, Article 593, gives that same person the right to impose directly any of the penalties in Article 58(1). The person who starts the investigation and the person who orders the dismissal may thus be one and the same.
The third change is in the remedy. The ordinary rule gives the officer 10 working days from the moment he learns of the penalty to challenge it before the head of the higher unit, and if the answer does not satisfy him he may go to the administrative court, with no prior procedure. By contrast, Article 611 of the same law says that, for penalties imposed for misconduct committed in these periods, the act takes effect from the date of communication and may be challenged directly before the administrative court. The penalty therefore produces its consequences at once, including where it is dismissal.
What this decision has not changed is the text itself. Nobody rewrote it, no interpretative reservation was attached to it, and nothing was said about what happens where the act belongs to the state of emergency but the investigation and the penalty come after it has ended. That was the very question put, and it stays where it was.
Advantages and disadvantages
What it improves
- It closes an uncertainty more than five years old. Between the referral of 10 March 2021 and the publication of the decision, 2,023 days went by in which the Craiova case had an unanswered question on the table, and the outcome was unknown both to the officer and to the police unit that imposed the penalty.
- It sets out on paper, in a single place, the whole disciplinary procedure for police officers, from who may order the preliminary investigation to the remedy available. Anyone looking for it elsewhere has to put together eight articles of the Status and the implementing rules in Government Decision no. 725/2015.
- It says plainly where complaints that are not of constitutional rank belong. Refused evidence and missing hearings are tried before the administrative court, and the officer learns this from the text of the decision itself, not after a failed attempt.
- It acknowledges openly, not obliquely, that the text restricts part of the safeguards. The reasoning claims only that what remains is enough, which leaves the discussion open for a criticism framed differently.
- It reproduces in full the contested rule and those around it, so the decision can be used directly in old cases, without reconstructing the form of the law as it stood on the date of the act.
What remains a problem
- It does not answer the question that was put. The criticism concerned the situation where the act belongs to the state of emergency but the investigation and the penalty come after it has ended. The reasoning treats the text in general terms and never touches this gap in time.
- The preventive argument cuts in two the very protection it examines. The Court holds that police officers are encouraged to keep discipline knowing that a breach of the rules is accompanied by a restriction of the safeguards of the rights of the defence. Procedural safeguards thus become a lever of deterrence, not merely a consequence of urgency.
- The disciplinary board disappears precisely where the decision says it is most needed. The reasoning explains that the stage is justified by the gravity of the penalties, and that for the light ones the legislature did not even require it; yet the text confirmed removes it for all penalties, dismissal included.
- Article 53 of the Constitution is invoked but is not checked step by step. The conditions in that article, namely the aim, the necessity in a democratic society, proportionality and the absence of discrimination, remain unexamined. The conclusion that the text sits well both with Article 24 and with Article 53 rests on one and the same piece of reasoning.
- Publication came 316 days after delivery, that is more than ten months. The ruling had existed since 11 November 2025, but it produced no effects, and the courts could not apply it.
- The text confirmed has a twin that nobody attacked. The same removal of the board also follows from Article 593 of the Status, so upholding the plea would have left the practical result unchanged.
Practical advice
- If you have a pending case arising from a disciplinary penalty imposed for an act committed during the state of emergency, move your defence from constitutional ground to the ground of fact and procedure. The absence of the disciplinary board is no longer an argument; compliance with the summons, the hearing of the officer, the recording of what he said and access to the documents of the investigation still are.
- Check the date of the act, not the date of the penalty. The text applies according to the moment the misconduct was committed, not the moment someone opened a file, and an act predating the declaration of the state of emergency stays under the general rule, disciplinary board included.
- Ask for the draft report of the preliminary investigation and use the 3 working days the law gives you from the moment it is handed over. That is the interval in which you can raise objections and ask for fresh evidence in your defence, and with the board removed it is also the only moment left in which you can ask for the file to be completed.
- Ask for assistance from the first day of the investigation, not after the penalty has been communicated. The law gives you the right to be assisted, on request, by a police officer of your choice, by a representative of the National Corps of Police Officers or of the trade union, or by a lawyer.
- Do not confuse the two remedies. For misconduct committed during a state of emergency, a state of siege, mobilisation or war, the law provides for a direct challenge before the administrative court. Anyone counting the 10 working days for the complaint to the head of the higher unit risks finding out too late that the special text sent him elsewhere, so the safest course is to go to the court within the shorter of the two periods.
- Remember that the penalty takes effect from communication. It is not suspended because you have challenged it, and if it is dismissal the service relationship ends before the first hearing, so the application to suspend the administrative act is filed at the same time as the action.
- If you are preparing a fresh plea on the same text, build it on other articles of the Constitution. The operative part of this decision covers only the criticisms based on Article 24 and Article 53, and the question about acts investigated after the end of the state of emergency has gone unanswered.
Frequently asked questions
What did the Constitutional Court decide, in short?
Does this mean a police officer can be dismissed without a disciplinary board?
What is left of the rights of the defence in this procedure?
From which day does the decision take effect?
Does the text apply after the state of emergency has ended?
How long did the procedure take?
Can I still challenge the penalty if I have missed the deadline?
Who raised the plea and why does it matter?
Editorial analysis
The first observation does not show itself on a straight read of the decision, because it calls for comparing two paragraphs set far apart. At paragraph 25, the Court explains why the stage of the disciplinary board exists: because the penalties that may be imposed are serious, namely the postponement of promotion for 1 to 3 years, the move to a lower post and dismissal from the police. In the same place it notes that for the light penalties, the warning and the written reprimand, the legislature did not even require the board to be consulted. The argument is therefore built on gravity. Only the text confirmed removes the board for all the penalties in Article 58(1), dismissal included, that is precisely for those that justified the existence of the stage. The reasoning explains the purpose of a safeguard and, in the following paragraph, accepts its removal exactly where that purpose was greatest, without saying why the argument does not turn against the ruling.
The second observation concerns what is missing from the reasoning. The criticism had a conditional form: the text would be unconstitutional in so far as it is read as allowing penalties to be imposed without the board for acts belonging to the state of emergency, where the preliminary investigation and the penalty take place after it has ended. It is the only formulation in the eight paragraphs setting out the plea that describes a hypothesis rather than a grievance. That hypothesis is never taken up again. Paragraphs 13 to 30 analyse the rule in the abstract, as though the act, the investigation and the penalty were all in the same period. The practical result is that the exceptional regime outlives the event that justified it: if the text attaches to the moment of the act, then misconduct from April 2020 can be punished without a board in 2026 too, six years after the state of emergency ended, on the basis of an urgency that no longer exists. The Court says neither that this is so, nor that it is not.
The third observation concerns a detail of vocabulary that would have passed unnoticed had it not sat in the sentence that carries the whole ruling. At paragraph 26, the Court holds that the officer may exercise his rights of the defence „in the course of the preliminary inquiry”, a phrase repeated twice in the same paragraph. The Status of Police Officers, however, knows no preliminary inquiry; the stage is called everywhere, including in the contested text, the preliminary investigation. The context makes it clear that the same stage is meant, so we have not listed the observation as an erratum: no reader in good faith reaches a different legal conclusion. It remains the case, though, that the sentence on which the rejection rests refers to a procedural stage by a name the law does not use, and decisions of the Court are quoted word for word.
The fourth observation changes what was at stake in the whole case and emerges from reading paragraphs 13 and 19 side by side. The text attacked, Article 584(2), removes the disciplinary board for misconduct committed in exceptional situations. Article 593 of the same law, quoted by the Court without any comment, provides by way of exception that, for exactly the same misconduct, the person who ordered the preliminary investigation may himself impose any of the penalties in Article 58(1), including those for which the general rule requires referral to the board and its consultation. These are two texts with the same effect, and the plea aimed at the first alone. Even if the Pro Lex union had won, the second would have remained in force and would have produced the same result, because a decision upholding the plea would have covered only the text the Court was seised of. The figure that says most about this case is therefore the number of texts that had to be attacked for the ruling to count in practice: two, of which only one reached the Court. The 2,023 days come only second.
Finally, an observation about the reason given. Paragraphs 27 and 29 explain the restriction not only by the need for speed, but also by an aim of prevention: police officers would be encouraged to keep discipline „knowing that a breach of these rules is accompanied by a restriction of the safeguards concerning the rights of the defence”. That sentence changes the nature of the discussion. A procedural safeguard restricted out of operational necessity is a measure of organisation; a procedural safeguard restricted in order to deter is a penalty imposed in advance, on everyone who comes to be investigated, whether or not they turn out to be at fault. The presumption of innocence is, moreover, the first principle of the disciplinary procedure in that same statute. The two things are never set against each other.
What should be changed
- The text should say plainly what happens when the investigation begins after the exceptional situation has ended. A single sentence in Article 584(2), tying the simplified regime either to the moment of the act or to the duration of the state, would close the problem the Court left open. Without it, each court will decide for itself, and police officers in the same position will receive different answers.
- The exception should be confined to penalties that produce no irreversible effects. If the reason is speed in exceptional periods, it is served just as well by keeping the board for dismissal, the only penalty after which there is no going back to the earlier position. The reasoning of the decision itself shows that the stage was designed for the serious penalties.
- Article 593 and Article 584(2) should be merged into a single text. Two parallel rules with the same content add nothing, but they make constitutional review illusory: whoever attacks one wins, at best, a victory without effect. A cross-reference from one article to the other would settle the matter without any change of substance.
- The interval between delivery and publication should be capped by an express rule. Here there were 316 days in which the ruling existed but produced no effects, and the court hearing the appeal could not apply it. A time limit written into Law no. 47/1992 would make predictable the moment at which the cases waiting for an answer can move on.
- The act imposing a penalty under the exceptional regime should state expressly the remedy and the time limit. The law provides for these penalties a direct challenge before the administrative court, whereas the general rule sends the matter first to the head of the higher unit, within 10 working days. A mandatory line in the disciplinary order would cost nothing and would spare someone the loss of the remedy.
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. 807 of 23 September 2026, pages 2-4 8 pages PDF, 82 KB the act starts on page 2
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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.