A false narrative promoted by a Russian conspiracist lawyer claims that the Court in the Hague proved Călin Georgescu right and changed Romania's border with Ukraine.
NEWS: ROMANIA'S BORDER WITH UKRAINE CHANGED IN 2009, WHEN ROMANIA WON THE PROCESS IN THE HAGUE, BASED ON THE 1997 TREATY WITH UKRAINE!
9,700 KMP BECAME PART OF THE ROMANIAN BORDERS, FROM WHERE WE ARE NOW EXTRACTING GAS AND OIL!
THE COURT OF JUSTICE IN THE HAGUE PROVED PNȚCD AND CĀLIN GEORGESCU RIGHT!
NARRATIVES: 1. The decision of the International Court of Justice in The Hague changed the Romanian-Ukrainian border. 2. The revisionism of the former presidential candidate with an anti-Ukrainian discourse, Călin Georgescu, is perfectly legitimate.
PURPOSE: To promote the sovereignist, anti-Ukrainian and by extension pro-Russian discourse, to lower trust in the authorities, to provoke and amplify social tensions.
The ICJ decision did not change the border, it only changed the delimitation of the EEZ
WHY THE NARRATIVES ARE FALSE: The Romanian-Ukrainian border is established by the Treaty between Romania and Ukraine on the Romanian – Ukrainian State border regime , which came into force in May 2004. The agreement provides that "the state border between Romania and Ukraine passes through the land as defined and described in the Treaty between the Government of the Romanian People's Republic and the Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the regime of the Romanian-Soviet state border of February 1961". Practically, the Northern and Eastern border of our country has not been modified by any official act, for over six decades.
What was changed in 2009, by Decision of the International Court in the Hague , was not Romania's border, but only the size of the continental plateau and the exclusive economic zone of our country. As we explained in a previous material , the terms "territorial waters", "contiguous zone" and "exclusive economic zone" must be understood correctly.
Therefore, according to the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and Law 17/1990 on the Territorial Sea and Internal Maritime Waters of Romania, the territorial waters of Romania include the strip of sea adjacent to the shore, having a width of 12 nautical miles, measured from the shore, their outer and lateral limits constituting the maritime state border of Romania. The contiguous zone is the strip of sea adjacent to the territorial waters that extends offshore up to a distance of 24 nautical miles. In this area, Romania exercises control to prevent and repress violations, on its territory, of its laws and regulations in the fields of customs, taxation, health and crossing the state border. The exclusive economic zone is established beyond the territorial waters and gives Romania sovereign rights and jurisdiction over the natural resources of the seabed, its subsoil and the water column above. Its extent is established on the basis of an agreement concluded with the neighboring states whose shores are bordering or located face to face with the Romanian coast of the Black Sea, and can be a maximum of 200 nautical miles.
Therefore, although the ICJ's 2009 decision recorded Romania’s first and only extension of jurisdiction and sovereign rights since the Great Union of 1918, it does not entail a change in the border, as defined by the Emergency Ordinance no. 105/2001 on the state border of Romania : "at the Black Sea, the state border passes by the outer limit and the lateral limits of the territorial sea of Romania".
A very clear argument that the area invoked by the lawyer (!!) Aurelian Pavelescu is not within Romania's borders is a recent incident, when a Russian missile hit a commercial ship transporting grain from Ukraine through the Black Sea, located approximately 30 nautical miles from the town of St. Gheorghe, i.e. exactly in the area he mentions in his argument. According to international maritime law, however, the attack was not categorized as a violation of Romanian territory.
In fact, Pavelescu's statement is not really about the information as such, but rather about justifying the revisionist speech of the former presidential candidate Călin Georgescu, who (re)launched the hypothesis of a territorial expansion of Romania based on historical claims, targeting Northern Bucovina, Bugeac and Northern Maramureș, against the background of a redistribution of Ukraine after the end of the war with Russia . Along with this scenario, Georgescu brought back to attention the Russian narrative of the “artificial” and illegitimate nature of the Ukrainian state , made up of Hungarian, Polish, Russian and, obviously, Romanian territories. The narrative claims that Ukraine is a Soviet invention, currently a failed and fragmented state because of its separation from the USSR and, more recently, from Russia’s influence.
In reality, Vladimir Lenin was forced to create the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic to clear the air following the Russo-Ukrainian War of 1917-1920. In the context of the Bolshevik revolution, the Ukrainian People’s Republic was proclaimed in Kyiv in 1918, which had diplomatic relations with a number of states, including Romania. There was a Ukrainian diplomatic mission in Bucharest and a temporary Romanian diplomatic mission in Kyiv. The leaders of the Ukrainian People's Republic spoke out against communism, but the new Ukrainian state was seized by the Bolsheviks in 1920.
Brief history of the Romanian-Ukrainian conflict
CONTEXT: After the disappearance of Ukraine as an independent state in 1920, relations between Bucharest and Kyiv were mediated, until 1991, by Moscow.
As far as the Black Sea is concerned, the Paris Peace Treaty of 1947, after the Second World War, left to Romania the Snake Island, located approximately 40 km from the Romanian shore. In 1948, however, the USSR illegally annexed the island, forcing Romania to sign an agreement delimiting the exploitation areas around it. In 1991, upon declaring its independence from the USSR, Ukraine also took over the Snake Island together with the area delimited by that agreement, but the Treaty on good neighborly relations and cooperation between Romania and Ukraine, of July 1997, established, at the request of our country, the possibility of resorting to the ICJ to solve the problem of the delimitation of the continental shelf and the exclusive economic zones in the Black Sea, in the event of the failure of bilateral negotiations.
The 34 rounds of negotiations between Romania and Ukraine failed, as a result of Ukraine's non-acceptance of the application of delimitation rules in keeping with the ICJ practice, proposed by Romania, in accordance with the provisions of the 1997 treaty. After the signing, in 2003, of the Treaty on the Romanian-Ukrainian border regime, entered into force in 2004, a necessary condition for Romania's referral to the ICJ, the last round of negotiations took place for the delimitation of the continental shelf and the exclusive economic zones in the Black Sea, which, in its turn, ended in failure. A few days later, Romania initiated the Hague trial, and in 2009, the ICJ pronounced itself in a public hearing, ruling in favor of Romania. The decision, the first adopted unanimously, was final, binding and enforceable, being immediately applicable, without any other formalities. It represented a remarkable success of Romanian diplomacy, by recognizing the jurisdiction and sovereign rights of our country over 9,700 square kilometers of continental shelf and exclusive economic zone in the Black Sea, representing almost 80% of the area of continental shelf and exclusive economic zone in dispute with Ukraine.
Aurelian Pavelescu is a "political adventurer", who’s been a member of no less than five parties: the National Liberal Party, the extremist National Right party, the Democratic Party, the National Initiative Party (led by the pro-Russian propagandist Cozmin Guşă) and the Christian Democratic Peasant National Party (PNTCD), whose president he has been since 2010. Under his leadership, the PNŢCD became a totally irrelevant party on the political stage, going through several identity processes and splits and shady alliances, to say the least, such as the one with the Social Democratic Party (PSD) in 2019, or the one in 2022 with the Alliance for the Motherland (APP), the party founded by the former leader of the PSD, the criminal convict Liviu Dragnea. Previously, in 2012, Aurelian Pavelescu stood against “a conspiracy against Romanians”, set up by his future Social-Democratic allies, together with current Liberal leaders, back then members of the PDL.
Over time, Pavelescu has been accused by the MEP Cristian Terheș of having caused a 700,000 lei damage to the party. In addition, several voices from the PNŢCD leadership accuse him of having sold the party's historic headquarters, in the center of Bucharest, at a much under-valued price compared to the market price.
In recent years, Aurelian Pavelescu has made himself known only by promoting conspiracy theories, related to the covid19 pandemic, vaccination or Romania's pro-European path. With the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, he has constantly adopted anti-Ukrainian positions, turning into a spokesperson for the false narratives promoted by Moscow to justify its aggression against Kyiv.
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