404 missing international adoption files

It is a story about international adoptions, which in the 90s were made in impressive numbers and which also left their mark on Romania's image. At the time of the accession negotiations, from the beginning of the 2000s, Romania had to amend its legislation and close the endless series of sending orphaned children or children without opportunities across the borders. One of the most difficult conditions to fulfill was the stopping of international adoptions, and the rapporteur for Romania, Baroness Emma Nicholson, then invoked the "rule of law" that must be respected also regarding adoptions. Romania changed its vision, but the era of the 90s also left 404 international adoption files in the dark, which disappeared. Entirely.

On February 20, 1997, the leadership of the Bucharest Court, led by Judge Viorel Roș, notified the Police about the disappearance from the court archive of 248 civil files concerning international adoptions.

The then Minister of Justice ordered an extensive check at the Bucharest Court and the judicial inspectors of the higher court, the Bucharest Court of Appeal, found that 404 civil adoption files had disappeared: 173 from the period 1990-1993 and 231 files from the period 1994-1995 . Along with the files, several minutes of meetings from 1994-1995, meeting folders and record books disappeared.

"I asked for a check to be made and a report on the situation created. The report was made and after that I think a criminal complaint was also made. Unfortunately, as far as I can remember, the criminal investigation did not lead to any results, that is, it did not discover the perpetrators", Valeriu Stoica, former Minister of Justice, told us.

He says he no longer has the report drawn up at his request, but that it should be in the ministry's archive. The Ministry of Justice claims that in 1997 there was a structure that checked the activity of judges, but it did not find the report ordered by Valeriu Stoica.

"During the period referred to in your request, i.e. the year 1997, the competence of the control activity was divided and assigned, according to the matter, to several departments within the Ministry of Justice, the Inspection Corps having the powers of verification and control of the activity, training and professional skills of judges .(...) At the level of the Control Body, no inventories were identified with control reports of the activity of judges/courts since 1997", the ministry's response states.

"Unfortunately, the criminal investigation did not clarify the situation and it was not known what happened to those files. It was very unpleasant, unfortunately," Valeriu Stoica told us.

The report was not kept at the Bucharest Court either, the administrative documents being destroyed every 3 years.

However, the conclusions of the report were presented in a press conference in 1997, and they were reproduced in the newspapers of the time .

Fragrant irregularities

Thus, from the material we learn that the control team that made the checks was composed of four inspector judges, including Gabriela Victoria Bîrsan, a judge at the Bucharest Court of Appeal at the time, who later reached the High Court and was accused and tried for bribery and which was definitively paid.

The control lasted for two months, between April and May 1997. The magistrates involved escaped disciplinary sanctions because, according to the law at the time, the sanctions could be applied within 1 year from the date of committing the acts.

One of the conclusions of this control is that "another cause that led to the perpetuation of the phenomenon over time was the distribution of files by sections, respectively their judgment mainly by the Third Civil Section, especially by a certain panel: Daniela Brăgău and Claudia Gherbovan Silinescu ". The latter is the daughter of the former SIE general, Constantin Silinescu.

If on the administrative side things were clear and those involved could no longer be sanctioned, on the criminal side the investigations stagnated until the facts were prescribed.

In March 1997, the General Prosecutor's Office begins the criminal investigation "in rem" in relation to the disappearance of the files from the court and, six months later, it is proposed by report "to postpone the criminal investigation indefinitely" and to send the file to the Bucharest Municipal Police "in order to be included in the record of cases with unknown perpetrators".

In this case, the police interviewed several clerks and archivists from the Bucharest Court under the accusation of destruction of documents. Later, there were indications that judges from the court were also involved in the case, so the case was declined to a higher prosecution structure which, in turn, severed the case.

Rankings per line

In the final resolution not to initiate the criminal prosecution, dated October 26, 1999, the judges who were suspected of forgery in international adoption files are nominated. In justifying the solution of not starting the criminal investigation, the prosecutor Alexandru Șerban claims that the disappearance of the files and the conditions of the sessions and terms occurred against the background of a bad management of the court archives, something that cannot be imputed to the judges who work there.

Thus, prosecutor Șerban stated that "the act of Judge Șega Marius Constantin, a lawyer on that date, who requested the reinstatement of two adoption files, a request initially accepted by the president of the 3rd Civil Section (...) does not meet the elements constitutive of a crime, for which reason it will be decided not to start the criminal prosecution", it is stated in the classification resolution from 1999.

Mirela Pod and Mihai Tomescu were two other judges investigated and exonerated. The two resolved three cases, through which they approved the adoption of Romanian children by Italian citizens. " After pronouncing the decisions, the two judges handed over the files to the session clerk, who, in turn, submitted them to the head clerk of the Section, recording this aspect in the session notebook ." Later, this notebook was no longer found, and prosecutor Şerban found it appropriate that there was no evidence against the two judges.

Other judges against whom pre-trial proceedings were carried out were Danielă Bărăgău and Claudia Gherbovan Silinescu , accused of " inserting false statements ". Prosecutor Şerban did not agree with the conclusions reached by the police, namely the fact that the two entrusted children for adoption to foreign citizens without the approval of the Romanian Committee for Adoptions, which stipulated that at least 6 months were tried to entrust the child internally. The magistrate abolished this hypothesis claiming that European legislation must be applied in the case and that this term does not exist there.

Thus, all these judges accused of forgery in documents were removed from criminal prosecution by the General Prosecutor's Office.

• In 2019, judge Marius Șega retired from the Bucharest Court.
• Mirela Pod retired from the Bucharest court in 2014, and Mihai Tomescu , who became a judge at the Bucharest Court of Appeal, died in 2018.
• In 1996, a few months before the subject of the missing files exploded, Claudia Silinescu Gherbovan resigned from the judiciary and became a lawyer .

Enviable speed

I spoke with a former witness in this case, who chose to remain anonymous. " I was called along with 7 other colleagues to the prosecutor's office. It was a bit of a tough cross-examination. I told them about the improper storage conditions of the files. The control team did not go down to the archive, they were asking for certain files. Some were missing tabs, others were missing at all. That was in 1997. Then I was called to a police station only once after 4 years. They asked me if I remembered anything else. Since then, I don't know what happened to the file ," the witness told us.

Asked what he thinks happened to the 404 missing adoption files, he stated: " The adoption procedure took quite a long time, months. Registration of the case, summoning of the parties, then court terms. It would be an option for the files to come in a package from somewhere. If anything was done, it was done to avoid the administrative procedures, which are long. It's one thing to solve an adoption in three days, another in three months. In chaos it is harder to find a culprit. It was a stressful time. Hard for me, hard for my colleagues ," added the quoted witness.

The investigations in Romania regarding international adoptions were also opened following the notifications of some high representatives of the EU, which showed that dozens of adoption sentences were pronounced in a single day, by the same judge.

How those children left the country in such a short time is still a mystery today. " Normally, they definitely needed passports. At that time there were collective passports or for minor citizens there was the possibility of a minor child being placed in the passport of an adult, of a parent. In the 90s, there was a very strict record of people leaving the territory of Romania ", said the quaestor Mirel Toancă, the deputy director of the Directorate of Passports.

Lasting friends

I have shown above that, in 1997, one of the judicial inspectors who checked the solutions given by the magistrates of the Bucharest Court, including the cases judged by Claudia Silinescu Gherbovan, was Gabriela Bîrsan .

In July 2014, lawyer Silinescu and judge Bîrsan, who had meanwhile reached the supreme court, were sent to court by DNA prosecutors for giving and receiving bribes, respectively. According to the prosecutors, Silinescu Gherbovan would have paid more, such as parties for the judges' own birthdays at exclusive restaurants in Paris and Bucharest, vacations and plane trips. In exchange for these favors, the judges gave favorable solutions to the companies represented by lawyer Silinescu Gherbovan.

In the same file, the judge Alina Corbu from the supreme court was also sent to court, accused by the prosecutors of having warned Silinescu Gherbovan "as a friend" that she was being intercepted by the DNA.

In May 2018, all the people sent to court in this case were definitively acquitted by the supreme court.

A year later, in May 2019, the lawyer Silinescu Gherbovan made a request to the Section for Judges of the Superior Council of Magistracy (CSM) to be readmitted to the judiciary without an exam . " I left for personal reasons, in 1996, after problems arose in the family regarding my father's health (Constantin Silinescu, former deputy of the Foreign Intelligence Service, editor's note). The schedule was much more flexible, the husband being a lawyer. I was left with the nostalgia of this profession. I want to return, because I trained as a judge with a sense of duty, it is the profession with which I want to end my career ", argued Silinescu Gherbovan in front of the judges of the CSM. With the vote of 6 out of 9 magistrates from the Section for Judges, Claudia Silinescu Gherbovan was assigned to a judge position at the Ilfov Court.

On May 30, 2019, the President of Romania, Klaus Iohannis, signs the decree appointing Claudia Silinescu Gherbovan to the position of judge.

June 2019, the acquitted judge Alina Corbu is the only candidate for the head of the High Court of Cassation and Justice, a 3-year mandate that she will take over from September 2019.