Outgoing Attorney General Florenta said on Tuesday that Romania has been exposed, in the last two years, to increasingly sophisticated forms of hybrid attacks and disinformation campaigns exploiting real or perceived vulnerabilities and speculating latent social discontents.
Florenta is no longer running for a new term as attorney general, but he is nominated by Justice Minister Radu Marinescu for the position of deputy chief prosecutor of the Directorate for Investigation of Organised Crime ad Terror (DIICOT).
On the occasion of the presentation of his activity report for three years as head of the Public Prosecution Service, Florenta on Tuesday spoke about the hybrid attacks on Romania of late, and also about "significant pressures" on the judicial system
"In the last two years, Romania has been subjected to increasingly sophisticated forms of hybrid attack, disinformation campaigns, coordinated manipulation in the online environment, attempt to undermine trust in fundamental institutions of the state. However, these techniques are not accidental. They exploit real or perceived vulnerabilities, speculate on latent social discontent and amplify collective emotions, in order to generate polarisation and mistrust. Over the past year, the judiciary has come under significant pressure, some legitimate, some deliberate, sometimes part of delegitimisation campaigns aimed at weakening public trust in judicial institutions. In the end, criticism is natural in a democracy, it is even necessary, but when criticism generates systematic mistrust, when individual cases are transformed into generalisations about the entire system, and public dialogue is replaced by permanent suspicion, the risk is no longer only for the institutions, the risk is also for the functioning of the rule of law," Florenta said.
He added that another phenomenon that has undergone an exponential amplification starting with the autumn of 2024 was the increase in extremism and instances of instigating hatred and discrimination.
From this point of view, in 2023-2025, the Attorney Gneral's Office monitored every six months the situation of the cases concerning offences under OUG 31/2002, as well as the crimes by which acts of violence, hatred or discrimination are instigated, on which occasion it was found the very low number of notifications regarding the commission of these crimes that come from the police, other institutions with powers in combatting discrimination or natural or legal persons.
Thus, before 2024, an average of only 21 such notifications per year was constantly recorded at the level of the entire Public Ministry.
It was also found that there were areas in the country where the prosecutor's offices did not receive, during a calendar year, any notification or at most one for this category of crimes, which would come from an authority or institution monitoring and combatting hateful or discriminatory behaviours, such as the jurisdiction of the prosecutor's offices with the Bacau, Constanta, Galati, Iasi, Oradea and Suceava courts of appeals.
Consequently, at the end of 2025, 1,031 criminal cases were already being investigated of crimes under Articles 368 and 239 of the Criminal Code, most of them initiated as a result of own notifications by the criminal prosecution bodies.
He said that, when he took over as attorney general in 2023, the Attorney General's Office was facing an acute shortage of staff, organisation and internal regulation.
"In 2023, just about 39% of the non-management positions at the Attorney General's Office were filled, the lowest in history, and all of the management positions were open. Also, the office had an internal organisation that had not been adapted to the developments in the operation for about 20 years. Last but not least, the Attorney General's Office carries out its activity based on the laws on primary organisation and functioning and according to the internal regulations (Orders of the Attorney General) that organise the activity of prosecutors' offices on different sectors of activity. From that perspective, when I took over as the attorney general , the Public Prosecution Service was facing from an acute lack of regulation, as the last important regulations had been issued over 10 years previously."
Next, he listed some measures to solve the problems related to the staff crisis and the management of the huge log of files, including the adoption of a new internal regulation of the prosecutors' offices, the implementation of an extensive internal regulation programme and the digitalisation of the Public Prosecution Service.
Florenta also mentioned unequal workload between the prosecutor's offices, as a result of the different territorial jurisdiction of each prosecutor's office. As an example, there is currently a huge disproportion between prosecutors' offices with high caseloads (with an average of 5,500 cases/prosecutor) and those with lower caseloads (an average of 350 cases/prosecutor).
"In order to remedy these dysfunctions, the solution identified was the reorganisation of the administrative map of the prosecutors' offices by setting up a single prosecutor's office at the county level, which would function next to the judges, based in the county seat, and the transformation of the other prosecutor's offices into secondary offices. That would entail the first modern reorganisation of the prosecutor's office in the last 30 years. As early as 2024, the justice minister submitted to the Ministry of Justice a proposal to amend the legislation in that regard. Following the efforts made, on February 24, 2026, the Ministry of Justice submitted to public debate a bill on the reorganisation of prosecutors' offices," said Florenta.
Among the files sent to court by the Attorney General's Office during his tenure, Florenta mentioned the violent repression of the public demonstration of August 10 in Victoriei Square; a car bomb murder in Arad; the fire at the maternity hospital in Piatra Neamt; malpractice case at the SANADOR clinic; the case of the explosion in Crevedia and the case of the attack on the constitutional order in which Calin Georgescu and the group of the mercenary Horatiu Potra were involved.
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