From Strasbourg to Bucharest: How civil society turned a legal victory into Romania's femicide law
/
Red shoes protest in Bucharest, Romania, to raise awareness on the growing femicide crisis.
“It is an important day for us. Women in Romania will now have more protection mechanisms if they become victims of violence.”
On 23 April 2026, nine years after the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) condemned Romania's inaction in addressing domestic violence in Bălșan v. Romania, the country has enacted a landmark legislation on preventing and combating femicide. Despite the work to fully implement the judgment not being over yet, this legislation, which is the fruit of years of relentless advocacy, is already a blatant reminder of the key role played by civil society in turning judgments into effective rights and protection.
The case that started it all
Angelica Camelia Bălșan had endured eight documented attacks by her husband causing injuries severe enough to require hospital stays of two to ten days each time. She called the police, filed criminal complaints, and even petitioned the head of police. Each time, the system turned away, concluding she had “provoked” the violence and that it was not serious enough to qualify as a criminal matter. Eventually, her attacker received administrative fines, but nothing fundamentally changed to effectively protect her.
On 23 May 2017, the Strasbourg court found Romania in violation of Article 3 (prohibition of torture and inhuman treatment) and Article 14 (non-discrimination), ruling that the violence against Ms. Bălșan constituted gender-based discrimination. The Court noted, with grave concern, that a majority of Romanians at the time tolerated or perceived domestic violence as normal and, that the Romanian authorities, despite the existing legal framework, demonstrated “insufficient commitment” to address this systemic problem.
“The overall unresponsiveness of the judicial system and the impunity enjoyed by aggressors indicated that there had been insufficient commitment to address domestic violence in Romania.”
The key role of civil society
The story of how a Strasbourg judgment turned into a Romanian law is, above all, a story about what civil society does with a court judgment when a state moves slowly.
Within a year of the Court’s ruling, the Romanian government filed a first action plan, setting out the steps it had taken and will pursue to implement the judgments. In response, EIN member, APADOR-CH, immediately presented, on the occasion of the EIN May 2018 civil society briefing, its own observations to the Committee of Ministers – the executive body of the Council of Europe responsible for the supervision of the implementation of ECtHR judgments – arguing that the government's catalogue of legislative, policy and capacity-building measures had produced no measurable improvement. The government's own plan, tellingly, acknowledged that domestic violence had not diminished over the years but, on the contrary, had risen.
Andreea Bragă, Advocacy Coordinator, FILIA Center. EIN February 2025 civil society briefing.
What civil society demanded instead was measures that would address the issue of gender-based violence at a structural level. NGOs consistently advocated for investigations to continue even when a victim withdrew their complaint, to address the reality that women were often too frightened, isolated, or financially dependent to sustain a prosecution. They demanded real enforcement mechanisms for restraining orders, to put an end to a system where violating one carried only a minimal fine and aggressors faced no meaningful consequence and pushed for the nationwide rollout of electronic monitoring bracelets for aggressors. In addition, civil society called on the state to fund and operate shelters in every county, and to collect and publish femicide data, to close the statistical void that allowed officials to underestimate the scale of the problem.
The years that followed the judgment brought only incremental responses. During these years, civil society kept the pressure on, on two fronts simultaneously. In Strasbourg, the Network for Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and FILIA continued filing Rule 9.2 submissions, in 2020, 2025, and 2026, and kept engaging directly with the Committee of Ministers, for example on the occasion of the EIN February 2025 briefing, to push their recommendations forward. But, implementation of a judgment does not happen in Strasbourg on its own, it requires sustained and coordinated advocacy at national level. In Bucharest, the FILIA Centre spent years building the evidence base the state lacked and published the country's first Gender-Based Violence Barometer, which mapped femicide cases year by year. Civil society also organised rallies gathering thousands of people, and even contributed to capturing parliamentary support across every party to recognise the issue of femicide and domestic violence to the level of consideration they require. Ultimately, what changed the political atmosphere was the accumulation of loss, which could not be ignored any longer with publicly available data and the public pressure exercise by feminists organisations.
The response came in October 2025, when a group of eight female senators introduced a bill that quickly became the most co-signed legislative initiative in Romania's post-communist history, gathering over 270 signatures from across every party. The Senate adopted it in February 2026 with 97 votes to one. The Chamber of Deputies followed in March with 284 votes to one. On 23 April 2026, President Nicușor Dan promulgated the law.
What the new law actually introduces
Palace of Parliament, Bucharest, Romania, by Aleksander Dragnes
The new law does more than just putting a name on a crime. For the first time in Romanian law, femicide is defined as the intentional killing of a woman, whether by a family member or a third party, and is punishable on a par with aggravated murder, i.e. 15 to 25 years, and even life imprisonment. In addition, the law recognises the need for unconditional intervention by requiring criminal proceedings in cases of domestic violence to be initiated ex officio, without the need for a prior complaint from the victim. Proceedings will also continue even if the victim later changes their perception of the risk or withdraws their statement or complaint for various reasons. Civil society had long argued in favor of these measures, which are in line with the obligations assumed under the Istanbul Convention and with the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights.
The law also recognises the orphaned children of femicide victims as direct victims in their own right, entitling them to immediate protective measures, and introduces aggravated penalties when violence is committed in the presence of minors. It requires schools to include gender equality and non-violent relationships in their curricula. Crucially, the law not only mandates the systematic annual collection and publication of national data on femicide, but by defining it at a normative level, it operationalises it, contributing to closing the very data gap that for years allowed officials to underestimate the scale of the problem, and that civil society organisations felt responsible for filling in lieu of the state that had abdicated that responsibility.
“It is a historic moment for Romania, first of all because the concept of femicide is recognized - the fact that this systemic violence against women, in most cases, ends up ending in a murder. And we think it is important, especially because it provides for measures to identify the risk of femicide in time, but especially measures to prevent violence and femicide.”
Where does Bălșan’s implementation stands
The promulgation of the law represents a concrete milestone but, measured against the demands civil society has been formulated since 2018, it represents meaningful but incomplete progress for the full implementation of Bălșan v. Romania.
What has been achieved with the introduction of the legal definition of femicide – something human rights advocates had been calling for years – is significant. The automatic triggering of criminal proceedings addresses one of the most urgent failures the ECtHR identified, that is the culture of impunity that left aggressors facing nothing more than a fine. The mandatory data collection obligation transforms what was once left to NGOs into a state responsibility, and the recognition of children as direct victims closes a protection gap that had long been overlooked.
Progress has also been made on some of the infrastructure demands, though it remains partial. Electronic monitoring bracelets for aggressors were introduced by law in 2021 and began rolling out in 2022, but as of the most recent reporting, they continue to be used in cases of domestic violence at an extremely low rate. The state has allocated budget for new shelters and legal and psychological counselling centres, and investment has increased. However, the coverage remains uneven, and civil society organisations continue to run the majority of facilities in practice. Training for police, prosecutors, judges, and social workers in gender-based violence has been ongoing, though NGOs have consistently flagged that cultural change within institutions has been slower than legislative change, and called for the introduction of mandatory initial and continuous training modules on gender-based violence, domestic violence dynamics, and intersectionality for all relevant professionals.
While the Committee of Ministers continues to supervise the implementation of the Bălșan case, civil society organisations will continue to file Rule 9.2 submissions and advocate domestically for the remaining necessary reforms to bring Romania’s law and practice in line with international standards and in particular the Court’s findings.
Why this matters beyond Romania
The story of Bălșan's aftermath is a case study in what civil society can do with a court judgment. The European Court of Human Rights delivered the legal verdict that Romania was systematically failing to protect women from domestic violence, and as such a tool for civil society to use as leverage to address this systemic issue. Romanian civil society transformed that verdict into sustained political pressure at both international and national level, filling Rule 9.2 submissions, collecting and publishing data, protesting and capturing parliamentary support to the draft legislation.
The lesson is that while courts’ judgments carry legal weight, they do not possess a transformative power on their own but are rather a vehicle whose capacity to drive systemic change often depends on the resilience of civil society, particularly where political will is limited. The Bălșan judgment stemmed from the courageous decision of a woman to speak out and lead a long legal battle, but its broader impact on the Romanian society is primarily the result of the relentless work of advocates who leveraged the case until the political cost of inaction rose high enough that 270 parliamentarians signed their names to a bill.
While achieving full implementation of the judgment still requires the adoption of additional general measures, the enacted legislation marks a positive step in reinforcing a legal and political culture that is protective of women in a country where, on average, an attempted or actual femicide occurs every 2.5 days, and where 66 women were killed because of their gender in 2025.