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A group of Save Romania Union (USR) lawmakers and members were present on Tuesday at the High Court of Cassation and Justice, where a new hearing was held in the trial of former communist-era secret police Securitate officers Marin Pirvulescu and Vasile Hodis, charged with torturing anti-communist dissident Gheorghe Ursu to death.
The USR group gathered in front of the Supreme Court displayed a banner reading "No special pensions for Securitate henchmen".
"Hodis and Pirvulescu investigated my father before and after his arrest. There are witnesses who state that Gheorghe Ursu was systematically beaten up, from the first day of his arrest. He returned to his cell with swollen palms, beaten on his soles, with blood marks on his face and body, he was holding his stomach with his hands. The blows got increasingly violent because he didn't provide the statements the Securitate investigators wanted him to give. All these Securitate officers obviously did political policing and are guilty of crimes against humanity," said Gheorghe Ursu's son Andrei Ursu, as cited in a USR release.
The Save Romania Union lodged to Parliament a bill for scrapping special pensions for former Securitate officers who were found guilty by a court decision of suppressing and violating human rights, and also suspends the right to special pension for former Securitate members sent to court by the National Council for the Study of Securitate Archives for having violated human rights.
"We want special pensions of the Securitate officers to be cut. There are 1,300 people in Romania who received a decision as former political police workers and yet today, in 2023 Romania, they collect special pensions. We are talking about real people who were beaten to death, we are talking about families destroyed by Securitate henchmen who then switched to the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI). Hodis was head of the SRI Legal Service until 1999, 9 years after the Revolution. To this day, these people receive special pensions and are everywhere in the Romanian state's institutions. Parliament did not vote the USR bill, but we continue to fight for it," said Cristian Ghinea, coordinator of USR's Public Policy Department.
Former Securitate officers Marin Pirvulescu and Vasile Hodis were sent to trial by prosecutors for crimes against humanity, but they were acquitted in the first instance after Bucharest Court of Appeal judge Mihaela Nita changed the classification of their crimes to that of inhumane treatment.
Construction engineer, poet and writer Gheorghe Ursu was brutally investigated by Securitate in the 80s, for sending letters to Radio Free Europe and for keeping a diary in which he wrote down the horrors of the communist leadership. According to the prosecutors, between January and November 1985, dissident Gheorghe Ursu was the subject of informative and judicial investigation for acts or activities considered hostile to the communist regime. He was arrested on September 21, 1985 and died on November 17, 1985 in the Jilava Penitentiary Hospital. AGERPRES
