Mr. Marcel Ciolacu, Prime Minister, Government of Romania
Bucharest, January 18, 2025
Open letter
Why did we end up doing social work with prosecutors and cops?
Dear Prime Minister,
I am addressing you on behalf of the Centre for Legal Resources, the organization to which you sent your appreciation and encouragement in July 2023, when, in an unannounced visit, together with my colleagues, we found several people with disabilities locked up in “Căsuța Lu’ Min” in the commune of Bărdești, Mureș County. You must have been shaken by the image of a young woman, skin and bones, lying on the ground in the basement of the private social service, funded by public money. You and Ms. Simona Bucura-Oprescu, Minister of Labor, took immediate action to withdraw the license and relocate dozens of beneficiaries, adults with severe disabilities. That same evening, the County Police Inspectorate commander and the Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism – Târgu Mureș Territorial Office prosecutors announced that they had begun investigations. In the meantime, prosecutors in Mures sent to trial several defendants who have been held in police custody for 6 months.
This letter comes in the context of the unannounced visit I made a week ago to 5 foster care centers in Târgu Mureș. Once again the image of children who are skin and bones shocks Romania. And no, they do not look like that just because “that’s just the way they are”, but because they are not receiving adequate care.
I attached photos of two children who have received specialized care following the intervention of our organization over the past year, so that you can see the difference between how they looked when they were discovered in the foser care center in Târgu Mureș and how they look after they have received medical recovery in Bucharest.
It’s been eight days since everyone has been talking about the girl who is skin and bones in the foster care center on Trebely Street, no. 3 street, about the children locked in the bedrooms of the foster care center on Turnului 1b street or about those who live in unimaginable conditions in the foster care center on Branului street or in the overcrowded and doorless bedrooms in the foster care center on Slatina street, about the expired medicines and the DSP fine, the kitchen closed by ANPC inspectors because of the filth and expired food or the historic fine left by the social inspectors of the County Agency for Social Benefits and Inspection Mures.
63 children live and “benefit” from services in illegally operating foster care centers. Operating licenses expired on December 2, 2024.
However, unlike in July 2023, the children are still there, in foster care centers that are operating illegally and that everyone in charge knew about. As then, police and prosecutors were notified. However, no one has yet taken an official decision to place the children in an appropriate environment, in the best interests of the child.
In the meantime, the application of the law amended at your initiative, precisely in order to sanction these situations urgently and harshly, remains a discretionary matter, even though we are talking about public institutions, funded by public money.
Because I trust that you will address the issues raised in this letter swiftly, I bring to your attention a few points of interest:
1. There are children who are still locked up in miserable conditions, without access to adequate habilitation services, who go to school only sometimes, more precisely when there are places in the minibus, but no more than twice a week, who have not received special equipment/devices for treatment (special chairs, orthotics, corsets, etc.), who have been separated by the DGASPC (County Directorate of Social Services and Child Protection) Mures from their mother, father, grandparents, brothers and sisters living in poverty, lacking material means for the care and habilitation of children. From the documents studied and from discussions with some of them, it emerged that the Romanian state institutions offered them no alternative. Therefore, instead of day care centers, recovery hours in the community or a specialist coming to the family’s home, money for powdered milk, education, social day-care centers or professional maternal assistants, the employees of DGASPC Mures chose the most expensive option, bad for the children, but advantageous for the employees: to institutionalize them.
2. The government under your leadership allows up to 80% of the budget allocated to a DGASPC to be used to pay the salaries of employees. Therefore, the remaining 20% must be used to provide food, medicines, accommodation and habilitation, transportation, heating, clothing, etc. The problem is not the amount of salaries, but the fact that most of the essential child care specialists do not get to work with these children. When we met them in the foster care center, they asked us “Don’t you see how they look, what do you want to do with them?”. We raised these issues with the management of DGASPC Mureș and CJ Mureș for 10 months in 2024.
3. The government has allocated over 1 billion lei to DGASPC Mures in 2024. After a simple calculation, on the budget execution until November 30, 2024, it is easy to conclude that the system is more advantageous for the employees than for the beneficiaries:
| Employees from DGASPC Mures received | DGASPC Mures beneficiaries received |
| Food allowance – 2,468.517 | Food – 2.791.972,62 |
| Holiday vouchers – 1.165.850 | Medication – 199.945,70 |
- Expenditure on employees’ food allowance accounts for 88.41% of the amount spent on beneficiaries’ food.
- Spending on medicines accounts for 17.15% of the amount spent on employee vacation vouchers.
- DGASPC Mures spends 1.2 times the amount spent on food allowance and vacation vouchers for its employees than the amount spent on food and medicines for beneficiaries.
4. Private money. Over the past year, CLR, a human rights organization without access to funds for social services, has invested in equipment, recovery classes, air conditioners, rehabilitation doctors, etc. to improve the overall physical and emotional health of these children. However, those who hold the children’s destinies in their hands did not even want to put into practice the recommendations of the volunteer medical specialists brought by the CLR from Bucharest, so that the medical letters left by the doctors for the settlement through the Mures County Health Insurance House of some equipment (special corsets) that would have helped the children have expired.
I note that this lack of interest is rewarded by the state with 55% bonuses for particularly dangerous conditions.
In conclusion, Prime Minister, we would like to draw your attention to the fact that eight days after the CLR and the Monitoring Board made public the information that these publicly funded centers are operating illegally, the children are still there. We have no minutes of closure of the controls, no reports, no relocation orders, no criminal complaints from AJPIS Mures (County Agency for Payments and Social Inspection), no plans by DGASPC Mures to identify professional maternal nurses, to contract services in the community, no doctors to see them. We have not seen a reaction from the Minister of Health either.
Delaying intervention for these children while awaiting the results of investigations by the judicial bodies – prosecutors and police – is both risky and illegal. Every day that passes without adequate treatment for some of the institutionalized children can be fatal.
Therefore, I ask you to remedy the situation of children placed in illegal foster care centers in Târgu Mureș as soon as possible and to appoint a team of independent experts to coordinate the relocation process.
We also demand that the president of the ANPDCA (National Authority for the Protection of Children’s Rights and Adoption), Mr. Rareș-Petru Achiriloaie, be dismissed as a result of his pre-judgment on the results of the controls in Mures and the way he represented the Government in Targu Mures.
It has been 2 years since we have been waiting for the promised great reform in social assistance, instead, now the situation is even worse: children with disabilities remain trapped in a system that operates illegally, due to the lack of promised social inspectors, insufficient qualified staff in the centers and the lack of habilitation services in the community (the reason given by DGASPC for institutionalization of children).
The lack of reaction from you in the public space raises questions, considering that these foster care centers are public institutions and not private, as was the situation in 2023.
Yours sincerely,
Georgiana Pascu, Program Manager, Centre for Legal Resources