Citizenship files submitted under the 5-month rule have moved to 2 years, and the Constitutional Court does not intervene

Anyone who filed a citizenship application under the 5-month period and is still waiting for an answer cannot invoke unconstitutionality in order to escape the new 2-year period. The Constitutional Court dismissed as inadmissible the plea raised by eleven applicants in as many cases before the Bucharest Tribunal, Second Division for administrative and tax litigation, holding that their grievance concerns the way the court applied the law, not its content. The decision directly affects the community of applicants from the Republic of Moldova and from the diaspora, for whom the Romanian State also runs separate support programmes for people returning home. Decision no. 493 of 19 May 2026 was published in Official Gazette of Romania no. 606 of 24 July 2026.

What is at stake is a time limit and its procedural consequences. Before Law no. 14/2025, published in Official Gazette of Romania no. 218 of 12 March 2025, the Citizenship Commission had 5 months to verify that the legal conditions were met. Under Article I point 15 of the new law, Article 15(10) of the Romanian Citizenship Law no. 21/1991 now provides that the verification report is to be drawn up within a period of no more than 2 years from the registration of the application with the technical secretariat of the Commission.

The contested text is the one that links the old regime to the new one. Article XIV(2) of Law no. 14/2025 states that the provisions on the procedure for the granting of citizenship also apply to applications registered with the National Citizenship Authority before the law entered into force, if they were still pending at that date. In practice, files that had already passed the 5-month mark suddenly found themselves under a 2-year period.

The consequence was felt immediately in court. The eleven applicants had sued the ANC for its refusal to decide their applications within the 5-month period, some of them 12 months before the new law entered into force. Identical applications, filed in the same period, met different fates: those tried before March 2025 were upheld, those tried afterwards were rejected on the ground that the new period applied. The authors of the plea complained of precisely this discrepancy, invoking Article 1(5), Article 15(2), Article 21 and Article 52(1) of the Constitution, as well as Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

What it changes in practice

The first effect is the one that has to be read correctly. The solution is one of inadmissibility, not a dismissal on the merits. The Court did not say that Article XIV(2) is constitutional, but that, as formulated, the criticism could not be examined, because it in fact concerns the interpretation and application of the text by the ANC and by the courts, according to the circumstances of each dispute. The legal basis invoked is Article 2(2) and (3) of Law no. 47/1992.

The second effect is procedural and immediate. The decision is final and generally binding from the date of publication, and the same plea can no longer be raised, under Article 29(3) of Law no. 47/1992. The disputes in which applicants sought an order compelling the ANC to answer within 5 months are left without this argument.

The third effect is the most useful in practice: the Court indicates where one should go instead. For the outcome of a specific case there is the remedy provided by Article 19(4) of Law no. 21/1991. For inconsistent practice between panels, jurisdiction lies with the High Court of Cassation and Justice, which has the constitutional role of ensuring the uniform interpretation and application of the law, under Article 126(3) of the Constitution. For this distinction the Court refers to Decision no. 393 of 18 June 2020, paragraph 25.

The fourth effect concerns the reasoning that the Court confirms, even without settling the merits. New procedural rules apply immediately, including to ongoing situations, as an expression of the principle tempus regit actum. The immediate application of the new law is not the same thing as retroactivity, and Article XIV(2), as the Court reads it, does no more than give effect to that principle.

The fifth effect is a distinction that many applicants miss. Article XIV(1), which was not contested, states that for pending applications the substantive conditions for acquiring citizenship remain those in force on the date the application was filed. What changes, therefore, is only the procedural rules and the time limits, not the criteria by which the file is assessed. The same line between procedure and substance runs through mining licences: the Court held that a royalty raised in the middle of a licence is not retroactive.

What has changed compared with the previous situation

In law, nothing changes through this decision. What changes is the procedural position of the applicants who hoped to obtain, by constitutional means, a return to the 5-month period for their own files.

The real change took place in March 2025, through Law no. 14/2025, which substantially rewrote the Romanian Citizenship Law no. 21/1991, both as regards the substantive conditions and as regards the procedure. The move from 5 months to 2 years for the Commission’s report is the most visible of those amendments for those who are waiting.

The legislature treated the two categories of rules separately, and Article XIV is precisely the article that draws this line. Paragraph (1) protects the substantive conditions: files submitted earlier are assessed against the requirements in force on the date of filing. Paragraph (2) does not protect the procedure: the new procedural rules apply immediately, including to older files still being processed. This asymmetry, intended by the legislature, is exactly what the applicants objected to.

The authors of the plea tried to rely on a well-known precedent, Decision no. 88 of 27 February 2014, by which the Court had established that the time limits in Law no. 165/2013 on the restitution of unlawfully seized immovable property do not apply to proceedings already pending before the courts. The Court did not take up the analogy, because it did not reach the merits of the criticism.

The Government had argued primarily for inadmissibility and, in the alternative, that the plea was unfounded. The Bucharest Tribunal, in all eleven cases, took the view that the plea was unfounded, noting that non-retroactivity concerns situations definitively established in the past, not legal situations that are still ongoing. The presidents of the two Chambers of Parliament and the Ombudsman did not submit their points of view.

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