Mayors cannot escape a conflict of office by invoking the education law: Romania’s Constitutional Court upholds the rule

A mayor removed from office for a conflict of office tried to show that the law itself had pushed him into the breach. The Constitutional Court told him the problem was not the law, but the way it had been applied to his case. Decision No. 760 of 11 December 2025, published in the Official Gazette of Romania only on 31 July 2026, concerns one of the most frequently invoked traps in Romanian local government: the ban on a mayor simultaneously sitting on the board of administration of a public institution. It is the second decision from the same sitting of the Court to reach the Official Gazette of Romania now, alongside the one on the income thresholds for legal aid, a sign of the wide gap between delivery and publication.

The author of the challenge, Ion Robert Rotea, was contesting before the Olt County Tribunal the prefect’s order establishing that his mayoral mandate had ended by operation of law, before term. The order followed a finding by the National Integrity Agency that he was in a state of incompatibility: he was mayor and, at the same time, a member of the board of administration of a school, that is, of a public institution.

His defence was built on a genuine contradiction between two statutes. Article 87 paragraph (1) letter d) of Law No. 161/2003, in the wording in force before 2017, prohibited a mayor from being a member of the board of administration of a public institution. At the same time, National Education Law No. 1/2011 required school boards to include representatives of the local authority. The challenger pointed out that the National Integrity Agency had identified hundreds of similar cases, mostly involving deputy mayors, and asked the Court for a decision with an interpretative reservation that would protect situations in which the assessment reports had not yet become final when the law changed in 2017.

The Court examined the request and dismissed it unanimously. For two of the contested texts, the sole article point 2 of Law No. 128/2017 and Article 160 paragraph (1) letter b) of the Administrative Code, the challenge was declared inadmissible: the criticisms concerned how the law had been applied, not its content. For Article 87 paragraph (1) letter d) of Law No. 161/2003, the challenge was dismissed as unfounded and the text was declared constitutional.

What it changes in practice

The decision is final and generally binding from the date of publication, 31 July 2026. It changes not a single letter of the law, but it closes off a line of defence that many local elected officials had tried in integrity proceedings.

Concretely, a mayor or deputy mayor found incompatible for sitting on the board of a school, a hospital or another public institution in the period before mid-2017 can no longer have the assessment report annulled on the ground that the statutory text was unclear or unforeseeable. Through the case law it restates here, the Court has already established that the conflict-of-office regime falls within the legislature’s discretion and that establishing the concrete situation is a matter for the administrative court.

What remains untouched is the possibility of winning the case on the merits. The Court did not say the National Integrity Agency’s report was correct, only that verifying its correctness is for the judge, in the light of the exact period in which the conduct occurred and the law applicable at that moment. The difference matters: the defence shifts from the constitutionality of the text to evidence and to the application of the law over time.

On the same line, the Court also rejected the criticism of how the assessment begins, confirming that the National Integrity Agency can act of its own motion.

For today’s local government the problem has eased, because Law No. 128/2017 introduced an express exception: members of the boards of administration of state or denominational education units and institutions and of public hospitals within the network of local authorities no longer fall under the ban. The decision therefore mainly affects older files, still pending before the courts or at the stage of contesting the reports.

What has changed compared with the previous situation

Until now, the argument about the contradiction between the integrity law and the education law circulated in the courts without a clear answer from the Constitutional Court on this exact combination of texts. Decision No. 300 of 18 May 2022 and Decision No. 320 of 30 May 2023 already existed, with rulings to the same effect, but each new file revived the discussion.

Decision No. 760/2025 adds one more confirmation, in unambiguous terms: no new elements have arisen that would justify a change of case law, so both the ruling and the reasoning from 2022 remain valid. For courts hearing such challenges, this is now the third decision they can rely on when refusing to refer a file to the Constitutional Court.

The boundary of jurisdiction has also been clarified. The Court explained, briefly, why it cannot itself resolve the contradiction invoked: identifying the applicable rule, analysing its content and adapting it to the facts established in the file are acts of interpretation, and the tools for that belong to the trial judge and the appellate courts, under Article 126 paragraphs (1) and (3) of the Constitution. If judicial practice is inconsistent, the remedy is not constitutional review but the mechanisms for unifying case law.

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