# What the courts knew before Femicide · Romania’s county courts, 2023–2026 Since 1 October 2026, Romanian law has required the state to count femicides, but by 28 October, according to the justice ministry, the rules for counting them had not been published. The court archive already shows something no official statistic links: at least 30 men tried since 2024 for killing or trying to kill someone had been taken to court, before the attack, by someone asking for a protection order against them. In 28 of these cases, a woman had asked. ## 2,123 trials Each mark is a trial before a Romanian county court (tribunal) since June 2023: murder, aggravated murder, fatal assault or attempted murder. Marks sit in the month the trial opened, usually months or a year after the attack. They are 487 killings, 1,247 attempts and 389 trials in which the public file does not yet show whether the victim died. ## 444 in the family In dark red: trials in which the prosecutor charged violence in the family (art. 199 of the Criminal Code). There are 444, including 175 in which the victim died. The public file does not say who the victim was. The court lists her or him as “Anonymised”, with no sex and no relationship to the defendant. ## 30 threads Each thread starts in the month someone asked a local court in the same county for a protection order against the man, and ends in the month of the attack he is tried for. A thread appears only if the ruling gives the date of the attack and the request came before it. Where the only date is the arrest and the request came less than two months before it, the thread was dropped: the request may have followed the attack. 7 of these men killed, 22 tried to, and in one case the file does not yet say. Counting also the cases with no attack date in the ruling, where the request came at least six months before the trial, gives 66. The link is the exact full name within the same county, and every case was read by hand. Names were not kept. Chance name matches would explain about one thread, judging by how often the same names turn up in requests in other counties. ## 28 women had asked for protection In 28 of the 30 cases, protection had been requested by a woman (judging by first name), alone or with someone else. In 14 cases, at least one of those asking shared the man’s surname. The public file does not say whether the woman who asked for protection is the person who was attacked. The thread shows only that a court had been told about him. ## 19 orders granted The court had granted the request, at least in part, in 19 cases. It rejected it in 2, in 7 the person who asked withdrew, and 2 ended otherwise. Half of the attacks came within 191 days of the request. ## One word: “live together” Romania’s Criminal Code counts a partner as a “family member” only “where they live together” (art. 177). An ex-husband, an ex-boyfriend or a partner who did not live with the woman does not count. Until April 2026, if he killed her, it was tried as ordinary murder, not violence in the family, and the link between them did not show in the criminal file or in court statistics. The domestic-violence law (217/2003) says otherwise: former partners are covered “regardless of whether the aggressor lives or has lived with the victim”. So the police and the protection order use one definition, and the criminal file another. The femicide law (53/2026) made it aggravated murder, from 26 April 2026, to kill as a form of control or domination someone with whom the killer “is or has been” in a relationship, “regardless of … whether the perpetrator lived with the victim”. Article 177, and with it the category “violence in the family”, was left unchanged. The data fit this gap without proving it: of the 30 threads, 19 lead to trials without a family-violence charge, and in 8 of them a woman with his surname had asked for protection from him. She may be an ex-wife, but also a mother or a sister. ## Deaths that are not “murder” When someone is beaten to death by an attacker who did not intend to kill, the offence is assault or injury causing death (art. 195). According to Eurostat’s methodological notes, the homicide statistic Romania sends is based on articles 188, 189 and 200: murder, aggravated murder and infanticide by the mother. Article 195 is not on the list. Of the 175 family killings tried at county courts, 22 were tried as fatal assault: 13%. The median first-instance sentence in those cases was 5 years, against 12 years for murder in the family. The femicide law calls the death of a woman from blows or injuries femicide too. Until now, the statistics have not counted them together. ## Who counts The police collect monthly data on family violence, including the victim’s sex and relationship to the attacker, but keep them on an internal platform. Romania reported 34 women killed by a partner or relative in 2024 to Eurostat. Partners are not reported separately. Prosecutors publish yearly case counts, but without the sex of victim or offender. Courts record the sex of the convicted person but not the victim or their relationship. That was the Council of Europe’s finding in September 2026 (GREVIO thematic report). Women’s organisations count from press reports. Published press totals for 2025 reach 59 women. Centrul FILIA counted at least 97 women killed from January 2025 to October 2026, by anyone. The femicide law, 53/2026, gave 90 days for a joint order of the justice and interior ministers and the prosecutor general setting out how the data are to be collected. That deadline fell on 25 July. The justice minister signed the draft order on 26 October and sent it to the interior minister and the prosecutor general to sign. The government decision on a risk-assessment tool was due on 26 October and had not been adopted by 30 October. The first annual reports are due by 31 March. ## In the region Per head, Romania’s official figure, 0.35 women killed by a partner or relative per 100,000 women in 2024, is below the EU figure Eurostat computes for the 18 reporting states (0.40) and below Hungary (0.40). Low figures also depend on what goes into them. Spain has kept an official register of women killed by partners or ex-partners since 2003, and records for each whether she had reported before: 16 of 49 in 2024, 11 of 48 in 2025. Italy created a separate offence of femicide in December 2025, punishable by life imprisonment. Bulgaria extended its domestic-violence law to intimate relationships in 2023 but does not define femicide or count it officially; the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee studied convictions from 2018–2023. Serbia has no official count. ## Method The trials come from the courts portal’s public service (portalquery.just.ro): every first-instance criminal case at the 42 county courts and the Brașov minors-and-family court with the subject murder, aggravated murder, violence in the family, fatal assault or infanticide, filed from June 2023 to 30 October 2026. Each case is counted once. Attempts are read from the case subject or the ruling. Violence in the family is read from a reference to art. 199. The month of the attack comes from the ruling (“offence of…” or the date of arrest), where given. For each defendant, the full name was searched in “protection order” cases at every court. A match required the same full name, a local court in the same county, the man as respondent, and the request before the attack. Every match was read by hand with names masked. Names stayed only in the working files used for the check, deleted afterwards; the published data hold no names or case numbers, and cases are identified by a code. Chance matches: the defendants’ names appear in protection-order requests in other counties 393 times, about 10 per county, against 322 raw matches in their own county. Of the raw matches, 30 passed every filter; applying the same share to chance matches leaves about one thread. As an independent check, in 4 trials the court also tried a breach of a protection order, so an order certainly existed before. The name link found 3 of them. The sex of those who asked for protection is inferred from first names. County figures under 10 are not shown. ## Limits - The public court archive holds only some protection-order requests filed before December 2023, so the number of threads is a lower bound. - Eight local courts publish no family cases at all, and provisional orders issued by the police that never reached a court are invisible. - The victim is anonymised. The page says “someone had asked for protection from him”, not “the victim had an order”. The person who asked and the person attacked may differ. - A name link can be wrong. Every thread was read by hand: the man was the respondent, and the request came before the attack. - A trial opens a year or two after the attack, so 2025 and 2026 are incomplete. If you are in danger: Call 112. Romania’s helpline for victims of domestic violence: 0800 500 333, free, day and night. ## Sources - [Romanian courts portal, public search service](http://portalquery.just.ro/query.asmx) - [Romanian Criminal Code, consolidated text (arts. 177, 189, 195, 199)](https://legislatie.just.ro/Public/DetaliiDocument/109855) - [Law 53/2026 on preventing and combating femicide](https://lege5.ro/Gratuit/ge4dkmryge3te/legea-nr-53-2026-pentru-prevenirea-si-combaterea-femicidului-si-a-violentelor-care-il-preceda-precum-si-pentru-modificarea-si-completarea-unor-acte-normative) - [Law 217/2003 on domestic violence, republished](https://legislatie.just.ro/Public/DetaliiDocument/156613) - [GREVIO, first thematic evaluation report on Romania, 2026](https://www.coe.int/en/web/istanbul-convention/romania) - [Eurostat, homicide victims by relationship to the offender (crim_hom_vrel)](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/crim_hom_vrel/default/table) - [Centrul FILIA, open letter to the justice minister (G4Media, 21 October 2026)](https://www.g4media.ro/190-de-organizatii-si-reprezentanti-ai-mediului-academic-cer-ministrului-justitiei-sa-actioneze-femicidele-ar-putea-fi-prevenite-doar-daca-legea-este-aplicata.html) - [Radio Cluj, 21 October 2026: six months after the femicide law](https://www.radiocluj.ro/2026/10/21/6-luni-de-la-legea-femicidului-autoritatile-numara-victimele-dar-masurile-de-preventie-intarzie/) - [Spain, Government Delegation against Gender Violence, women killed](https://violenciagenero.igualdad.gob.es/violenciaEnCifras/victimasMortales/fichaMujeres/home.htm) - [Italy, Law 181 of 2 December 2025 (femminicidio)](https://www.gazzettaufficiale.it/)