Illegal logging on trial: what Romania’s local courts decide

A hundred cases, from prison to acquittal

The cases are those registered at local courts as offences against the forestry regime. 91% concern cutting trees without the right to, or stealing them; the rest are other Forest Code offences, such as moving timber without papers.

Each square is one case in a hundred. For each case we took the harshest measure ordered against any defendant: if one defendant in three is sentenced to prison, the case is counted there.

Of the 911 cases that ended in a sanction, 147 (16%) have at least one defendant sentenced to prison. A first-instance ruling is not final, and the term to be served sometimes includes older sentences merged with the new one. Its typical length is 27 months, against 16 months for suspended sentences.

In 460 cases the sentence was suspended under supervision. In 164 the court set a penalty and postponed applying it: the penalty is never applied if, during the supervision period, the defendant keeps to the conditions and commits no new offence. 107 cases were closed because the statute of limitations had run out.

Before counting, we wrote down that fewer than 10% of sanctioned cases would end in prison. We were wrong: it is 16% (95% confidence interval 14–19%).

371 rulings (35%) were appealed. We could not reliably classify what the appeal courts change, so every number here describes the first instance.

The Ministry of Justice has said that 35 people were sentenced to prison for forestry offences in 2025, according to the broadcaster Digi24; we could not find the original document. We found 59 cases with a prison sentence at first instance in 2025. The numbers cannot be compared directly: one counts people, the other cases, before appeal.

How much damage reaches a judge

Since September 2020, cutting or stealing any tree from a forest without the right to do so is a crime in Romania, however small the damage. The law sorts acts into three bands by the value of the damage, measured in multiples of the average price of a cubic metre of standing timber. That price was fixed by law at 164 lei in 2017 and has not changed since. The thresholds are therefore 820 lei and 3,280 lei (about 150 and 610 euros). The new Forest Code, which applies to acts after 12 January 2025, keeps the thresholds and raises the penalties in the first two bands.

Half of these cases concern damage below 1,774 lei. 67% are under the 3,280-lei threshold. 12 of 510 reach 50,000 lei or more. Added together, the damage in all these rulings comes to 3.3 million lei over almost three years, about 620,000 euros.

The share of cases with a prison sentence rises slightly from one band to the next: 26 of 200 in the lower band (13%), 49 of 290 in the middle band (17%) and 32 of 161 in the upper band (20%). The difference could be chance (trend test, p = 0.08). In at least 28 of the 147 prison cases the ruling mentions a repeat offender.

These data do not show that large-scale cutting does not exist. They show that it is rare among the forestry criminal cases that reach a judge. For comparison: Greenpeace, Agent Green and Declic say, on the basis of the third cycle of the National Forest Inventory, that about 11 million cubic metres more wood leaves the forests each year than the paperwork records (statement of 9 December 2025). The calculation is theirs; we have not checked it against the inventory data.

From the act to the ruling: three years and four months

The date of the act appears in 243 of the 1,046 rulings. In half of those, more than 40 months passed between the act and the first-instance ruling; in a quarter, more than about 54 months.

The date is missing most often from the time-barred rulings, where it appears in 16 of 107, and those usually concern the oldest acts. The real duration is probably longer.

Time matters because criminal liability expires. For acts punishable by up to one year in prison, such as those in the lower band of the 2008 Forest Code, the general limitation period is three years (Criminal Code, article 154); procedural steps can interrupt it. 107 cases, 10% of all rulings, were closed as time-barred at first instance.

Where the ruling states the band, 28 of 228 lower-band cases were time-barred (12%), 10 of 305 middle-band cases (3%) and 1 of 169 upper-band cases. Many rulings do not state the band, so these proportions are indicative. For acts after 12 January 2025, the new Forest Code raises the lower-band maximum to three years in prison, which makes the general limitation period five years.

For every 100 criminal files opened in a year, five reach a court

For 2025 the Prosecutor General’s Office reported, according to Digi24, 9,417 forestry criminal files opened and 456 sent to trial. The ratio compares two flows in the same year; it does not follow the same files, because a case usually reaches court about two years after the act.

On the courts portal we found 455 cases filed in 2025, 4.8% of the number opened. The closeness to the prosecutors’ number suggests that our data cover most of what reaches a court.

The Public Ministry’s activity report for 2024 counts 742 people sent to trial for Forest Code offences (586 in 2022, 567 in 2023). In the cases filed in 2024 on the portal we counted 810 defendants, 9% more: the portal also holds split-off and re-registered cases, and the same defendant can appear in more than one.

What happens to the other files, from closures to prosecutors waiving the charge, cannot be seen on the courts portal.

Your court

The map shows, for each local court, how many forestry criminal cases have reached it since 2024, set against the area of tree canopy that disappeared in its territory between 2021 and 2025, as detected by satellite. Canopy disappears mostly through legal harvesting, but also through windthrow and fire. We use it as an indication of how much wood leaves the area’s forests; it does not measure illegal logging. The periods differ too: the cases are from 2024–2026.

The cases are concentrated: half reached 21 of the 179 local courts on the portal’s list. 13 courts whose territory lost more than 200 hectares of canopy have no forestry criminal case on the portal since 2024. Eight of them had more than 20,000 hectares of tree cover in 2000: Hațeg, Odorheiu Secuiesc, Brad, Moldova Nouă, Săliște, Dragomirești, Măcin, Giurgiu.

The link between how much canopy disappears and how many cases appear is weak: the rank correlation is 0.32 across 110 courts.

A small number can mean little illegal cutting, few detections, files that stop at the prosecutor’s office, or cases registered under another label. The data do not choose between these explanations.

Download the table by court (CSV)

What we predicted before counting

We wrote down five hypotheses, with thresholds, before seeing any national total. One of them failed.

How we worked

We queried the public service of Romania’s courts portal for the 179 local courts on its list and for 15 courts of appeal, with the case object “offences against the forestry regime” and, in a second pass, the other labels under which some courts register the same acts. That returned 1,869 first-instance criminal cases, of which 1,046 have a ruling pronounced between January 2024 and October 2026.

A program read the operative part of each ruling and recorded the harshest measure, the length of the sentence, the damage, the legal band and the date of the act. We tested it against readers who labelled rulings separately, without seeing the program’s output. On a fresh sample of 100 rulings, 96 matched. After the last corrections to the rules we repeated the test on another 60 rulings drawn at random: 57 matched. Of 48 rulings the program counted as prison, the readers confirmed 45; of the ten prison rulings the readers found in the random sample, the program found eight. The number of prison cases may therefore be slightly higher than shown here.

We publish no names, case numbers or ruling texts. In our working files the names of the parties were replaced automatically. We publish totals by court only, and where a court has fewer than five rulings we show only how many.

What these data cannot show

• The portal deletes old cases. Rulings from before 2024 are almost entirely missing, and the 2024 count may be slightly below the real one.
• Cases where the cutting is tried together with other offences, under another label, may be missing. At the county tribunals we found only two first-instance forestry criminal cases since 2022.
• Seven case numbers appear more than once at first instance (retrials, split-off files); we counted them as separate cases.
• The damage appears in 510 of 1,046 rulings and the date of the act in 243. On the sample we used to correct the rules, the program found the right sum in 57 of 62 rulings, the right month in 46 of 53 and the exact length of the sentence in 74 of 101.
• The damage is the sum in the ruling, computed under forestry rules; it does not say how many cubic metres were cut.
• Canopy loss comes from the Hansen global map (Landsat) and includes any disappearance of trees: legal harvesting, windthrow, fire.
• The outcome is the one at first instance. Appeals change some of the rulings, and a prison sentence does not show that the term was served.

Sources

• Romania’s courts portal, public query service (portalquery.just.ro), queried on 12 November 2026.
• Law 197/2020, in force from 11 September 2020: articles 107 and 109(1¹) of the Forest Code (Law 46/2008).
• Law 331/2024 (the new Forest Code), in force from 12 January 2025; the average price of 164 lei: Law 265/2017, article II, kept by Emergency Ordinance 89/2025.
• Criminal Code, article 154: limitation periods for criminal liability.
• Public Ministry, Activity report for 2024, p. 91: people sent to trial for Forest Code offences.
• Digi24, 2 April 2026: the Prosecutor General’s and Ministry of Justice numbers for 2025 (press report, in Romanian).
• Greenpeace Romania, Agent Green and Declic, 9 December 2025: their reading of the third National Forest Inventory cycle (in Romanian).
• Hansen/UMD/Google/USGS/NASA, Global Forest Change 2025 v1.13 (CC BY 4.0): tree cover in 2000 and canopy loss by year.
• Government Decision 1,217/2023: the localities in each local court’s territory.