Background
Nechita Rusu and Victoria Hedeș are Romanian pensioners, both born in 1948, who received old-age pensions for years before the Cluj Pension Authority unilaterally revised their entitlements downward. Rusu had his pension established in December 2012 at approximately RON 1,150 per month; Hedeș had hers established in March 2006 at approximately RON 1,458 per month. In both cases, the authority had initially counted periods during which the applicants worked at agricultural collective farms (CAP) as qualifying employment time for pension calculation purposes.
In May 2017 — five years after Rusu’s pension was set and over a decade after Hedeș’s — the Cluj Pension Authority issued revised decisions under Law no. 263/2010, concluding that those CAP periods should never have been counted because the applicants had worked as accountants rather than as ordinary farm members. The authority reduced both pensions by roughly 30% and demanded retroactive repayment of three years’ worth of overpaid benefits: approximately RON 12,749 (EUR 3,000) from Rusu and RON 8,939 (EUR 2,000) from Hedeș. Both applicants successfully challenged the revisions before first-instance courts, but the Cluj Court of Appeal ultimately ruled in favour of the pension authority in final decisions issued in late 2018.
The applicants brought applications to the European Court of Human Rights, arguing that the retroactive pension reduction and accompanying repayment demands violated their right to peaceful enjoyment of possessions under Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 to the Convention. In February 2025, the Romanian High Court of Cassation and Justice issued a preliminary ruling confirming that CAP employment periods under individual contracts could not count as qualifying time — validating the legal basis for the authority’s revised interpretation, though not addressing the proportionality of how corrections were applied to existing pensioners.
The Court’s Holding
The Court held unanimously that Romania violated Article 1 of Protocol No. 1. It found that the pension decisions initially granting benefits had given both applicants a legitimate expectation of continued receipt of those payments, constituting a property right protected by the Convention. The 2017 revised decisions — which retroactively stripped a significant portion of pension income and imposed demands for repayment of sums received in good faith over three years — amounted to an interference with the applicants’ possessions. While the interference was directed at a legitimate aim (correcting an administrative error and ensuring proper use of public funds), the manner in which it was carried out placed an excessive and disproportionate burden on the applicants.
The Court emphasised the principle of good governance: public authorities may correct their own mistakes, including those caused by their own negligence, but must not remedy such errors at the expense of the individual. Here, the error was entirely the pension authority’s own — made on the basis of evidence that was already before it at the time of the original decisions — and neither applicant had acted in bad faith or misled the authority. The authority then waited five to seven years after Law no. 263/2010 came into force before revisiting the applicants’ files, compounding the disruption to their financial planning.
Given the applicants’ very low incomes, their advanced age, the already-reduced pension amounts, and the additional financial strain of repayment demands covering three years of benefits, the Court concluded that Romania failed to strike a fair balance between the public interest and the applicants’ individual rights. The Court ordered Romania to refund Rusu the amounts already paid by him toward the repayment demand, and awarded him EUR 2,200 in non-pecuniary damages and EUR 3,000 in costs. No just satisfaction was awarded to Hedeș, as she had not submitted a timely claim.
Key Takeaways
- A state pension authority’s longstanding recognition of benefit entitlements creates a legitimate expectation — and therefore a property right under Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 — even if the original assessment later proves to have been legally incorrect.
- The principle of good governance requires states to correct administrative errors promptly and consistently; lengthy delays before correcting pension mistakes, followed by retroactive clawbacks of benefits received in good faith, are incompatible with the Convention.
- Even where a corrective measure pursues a legitimate aim such as fiscal rectitude, it will violate Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 if it imposes an excessive individual burden — particularly on elderly, low-income recipients for whom pension payments represent an essential source of income.
- A beneficiary’s good faith is a critical factor: where the original error was entirely attributable to the state authority and the individual did nothing to mislead it, the cost of correction cannot lawfully be shifted to the individual.
Why It Matters
This judgment reinforces the ECtHR’s consistent line of authority — drawn from Moskal v. Poland, Čakarević v. Croatia, and Béláné Nagy v. Hungary — that pension clawbacks generated by administrative misinterpretation, rather than by any fraud or misconduct by the beneficiary, engage serious proportionality concerns under Protocol No. 1. The decision signals to Romanian authorities, and to social-security administrators across Council of Europe member states more broadly, that the passage of years between an incorrect benefit assessment and its correction weighs heavily against the state when a court measures the fairness of any resulting repayment demand.
For practitioners advising pensioners facing retroactive benefit revisions, the case confirms that good faith reliance on an official benefit determination — maintained over many years — can ground a Convention claim even where the underlying domestic legal interpretation is ultimately resolved against the claimant. The Court’s remedy, requiring Romania to return sums already repaid by Rusu rather than merely halting future enforcement, also underlines that effective relief must be restorative, not merely prospective.