Transitional Justice for Competing Pasts in Romania

In 1989, Romania had to reckon not with one but with multiple, layered recent pasts, which included the 1989 revolution, and the communist and fascist regimes. This essay examines all the transitional justice laws adopted during the period 1989–2024 to understand which recent pasts were recognised by Parliament, the temporal order in which they were redressed, and the reasons for such choices. In the early 1990s governments neglected the fascist past and also failed to redress the crimes of the postwar communist regime. The desire to join NATO and the European Union prompted the adoption of the first Holocaust-related laws in 1997. The ranking of victims that resulted from this selective reckoning placed ethnic minorities at a disadvantage.