Eugen Chelaru’s research while affiliated with University of Pitesti and other places

There is no purely ethnic state in Europe, so the constitutional regulation of the tatus of minorities is a necessity. The Constitution of Romania, within the general principles of the constitutional system, regulates the right to preserve, develop and express the ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious identity of national minorities. These regulations set out the framework within which other constitutional provisions relating to the status of such persons and the general limits imposed to the legislator in defining it, should be laid down.

The executive power in Romania is made up of two branches: the Presidency and the Government. In its status as executive authority, the Government issues decisions by means of which the execution of laws is organized. Based on legislative delegation, the Government also issues legal acts. These are represented by ordinances and emergency ordinances. The external control over the two categories of documents that the Government issues is exercised in different ways: control of legality and control of constitutionality . For ordinances and emergency ordinances; there is only control of legality for decisions. Because government decisions have the juridical nature of administrative acts, the contentious control over them may be exercised either directly or indirectly. Direct control is achieved by bringing about an action for annulment and thus constitutes a full-jurisdiction contentious control that is exercised by contentious-administrative courts, which are part of the judiciary. However, the injured party may opt for dispute settlement by certain administrative jurisdictions. The judge may examine the lawfulness and, within certain boundaries, the opportunity of Government decisions with an individual nature and only the lawfulness of decisions with a normative nature. Indirect control is performed by invoking the plea of illegality, which is to be settled by the court vested with the merits of the case, whether it is a contentious-administrative court or a common law one.

Together with the Romanian President, the Government forms the executive. In its activity, the Government issues two categories of acts: decisions, which are the acts that organize the enforcement of laws (an activity that lies within its exclusive competence) and ordinances, by means of which a genuine delegated legislative activity is carried out. All acts issued by the Government are subject to control, but the nature of this review differs depending on the nature of the act. Thus, while decisions are subject only to a review of legality, which is exercised by the courts, under the Law of the Contentious- Administrative, ordinances are subject to both a review of legality and to a review of constitutionality. The peculiarities of the procedure for adopting Government ordinances also made their procedure of constitutionality control differ in some respects from the procedure of reviewing the constitutionality of laws. Thus, the constitutionality control of government ordinances is performed only after their entry into force, by settling the exceptions of unconstitutionality by the Constitutional Court; the exception of unconstitutionality may be brought to court only with the introduction of an action before the contentious-administrative court and not before another court or in another stage of the proceedings; the holder of the objection of unconstitutionality is only the applicant in the proceeding; the resolution of rejecting the criticism of unconstitutionality is a plea of inadmissibility, which, in all cases, obliges the contentious-administrative court to overrule the action as inadmissible. As an exception, the Ombudsman may appeal directly to the Constitutional Court against a government ordinance or against a provision of an ordinance, without having to file for a common law action.