View the Country Report for Romania in the Oxford Compendium of National Legal Responses to Covid-19
Romania is a unitary republic. According to the Constitution, the State is national and sovereign, unitary and indivisible, and the form of government is republican. The republican form of government, the unitary and indivisible nature of the State, as well as the original language are shielded from revision by an ‘eternity clause’. The political system is semi-presidential, with relatively weak powers formally assigned to the President.
Romania is a unitary state, which entails that concrete and specific public health measures are adopted by the executive authority at the central level; either by the Government, or by authorities subordinated to the ministries directly involved in combating the Covid-19 pandemic, such as the Ministry of Internal Affairs or the Ministry of Public Health.
A list of normative and administrative acts adopted by the national legislative and executive authorities on a national level may be found on the official website of the Ministry of Internal Affairs or on a website developed by volunteers with the support of the Romanian Government.
The measures that were included by the authorities in the general definition of ‘lockdown’ which were imposed by declaring the state of emergency and, subsequently, the state of alert, were related to:
· curfews or stay-at-home orders and total/partial movement control
· with the exception of medical cases related to Covid-19, limiting the activity of public hospitals to hospitalizing and resolving urgent cases
· social distancing measures and social movement restrictions
· travel restrictions, international or internal
· mandatory quarantines after travel, quarantine at home or at hospitals or at other spaces (hotels, etc.) and social distancing measures
· requisitions of goods and services
· closing of schools and kindergartens, or restrictions of their activity (online educational activity)
· closing of non-essential shops, hotels, restaurants (hotel, restaurants, shops and stores, apart from necessities, essentially food and drugstores)
· cancellation of recreational events and venues and the closing of public places.
The state of emergency was accompanied by provisions issued by normative and administrative acts, in turn issued by the central executive authorities of the Government. This included acts that provided for criminal or administrative misdemeanour (contravention, contravenție) sanctions.