Romania’s former Health Minister Nicolae Bănicioiu politically persecuted in a case compared to Alexei Navalny’s. Supreme Court draws parallels with Russian dissident killed by Putin’s regime

Romania’s former Minister of Health, Nicolae Bănicioiu, was definitively acquitted on October 13 by the High Court of Cassation and Justice (ÎCCJ) after the judges concluded that “the alleged act did not exist.” The former minister had been accused of receiving almost €800,000 in bribes, an allegation that proved entirely unfounded.

Nicolae Bănicioiu, politically persecuted in the style of Alexei Navalny

The reasoning behind the acquittal of Nicolae Bănicioiu reveals an unprecedented situation in Romania’s judicial history. The panel of four judges who cleared him of all charges invoked the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) case of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, who died in February 2024 in an Arctic prison after being unjustly convicted by Vladimir Putin’s regime.

The judges noted that Bănicioiu’s legal ordeal was “partially similar” to that of the Russian opposition leader, indicating that the Romanian former minister had also been subjected to procedural abuses and distortions in the construction of his case.

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The panel—composed of Mihail Udroiu, Lia Savonea, Adriana Ispas, and Gheorghe Valentin Chitidean—found that the prosecution’s case against Bănicioiu relied almost entirely on statements from witnesses with direct personal interests, including informants and co-defendants who had received legal benefits in exchange for their testimony.

“The factual situation retained by the European Court of Human Rights in the case Navalnyy and Ofitserov v. Russia is partially similar to the present case, where most witnesses either acted as informants or were co-defendants in a parallel criminal case from which the present case was separated,” the judges wrote in their decision.

In that 2016 case, the ECHR condemned the Russian government for using the justice system for political purposes. The Court found that Alexei Navalny and his business associate Piotr Ofitserov had been convicted on the basis of an arbitrary interpretation of criminal law and distorted evidence, in a trial designed to silence political opposition.

In its reasoning, Romania’s Supreme Court explicitly criticized the judicial practice of relying on denunciations made by individuals already involved in other criminal cases.

“The five-judge panel, by majority opinion, considers that the statements made by witnesses during the criminal investigation have only conditional evidentiary value and cannot be used as the determining basis for establishing the truth in this case,” the ÎCCJ stated.

A parallel with Navalny’s persecution

The case of Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition figure, has become a global symbol of resistance against judicial and political abuse. After being poisoned in 2020, Navalny returned to Russia following treatment abroad, where he was arrested and later sentenced to 19 years in prison on politically motivated charges. He died in February 2024 in an Arctic penal colony, under circumstances widely condemned by the international community as state murder.

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In citing Navalny’s case, the Romanian judges drew a stark parallel between the manipulation of justice in authoritarian regimes and the dangers of similar practices in democratic systems, suggesting that Nicolae Bănicioiu’s prosecution bore the marks of a politically motivated and flawed judicial process.