In a single session Tuesday, Romania’s audiovisual regulator (CNA) voted unanimously to pull the broadcast licenses of two of the country’s most prominent opposition-leaning outlets. The decision has ignited a fierce debate about whether administrative procedure has been weaponized against press freedom.

The National Audiovisual Council – CNA in Romanian – met in a public session on Tuesday and emerged having shut down Realitatea Plus television and Gold FM radio in the same afternoon. The stated reason in both cases was the same: unpaid fines. The implications, however, stretch far beyond accounting.

Cozmin Gușă, the owner of Gold FM, did not mince words in his immediate response. Writing on Facebook minutes after the decision, he called the withdrawal of his station’s license illegal, abusive, and issued without prior notification.

“Because the truth must not be told,” he wrote. “Like in SECURISTAN.” The reference to Romania’s communist-era secret police apparatus was pointed. Whether or not one agrees with Gușă’s politics, his reaction captures something that cannot be easily dismissed: two outlets known for critical coverage of the political establishment were closed on the same day, by the same body, for the same category of infraction.

Gold FM’s situation deserves attention on its own terms, separate from the larger and more high-profile Realitatea Plus case. The station had five fines contested in court and unpaid. Gușă’s public statement claims the license was withdrawn without prior notification, a claim that would show  a procedural failure of considerable gravity.

Regulators are not supposed to shut broadcasters down by surprise. The entire logic of a grace period – six months under Romanian audiovisual law to demonstrate payment of fines – exists precisely to give outlets time to comply, appeal, or negotiate. IGold FM was not formally warned that its license was at risk in the immediate term, and this omission matters. Administrative law is built on the principle that consequences of this magnitude require adequate notice. A broadcaster losing its right to operate is not a parking ticket.

Gușă announced he will file a complaint and contest the decision in court. He acknowledged, with evident bitterness, that Romanian justice is “also from SECURISTAN.” That cynicism about the independence of the judiciary reflects a broader erosion of institutional trust that decisions like Tuesday’s do nothing to repair.

The fines themselves, contested in court, which means their legal validity has not been definitively established, were treated by CNA as enforceable obligations. The regulator’s legal department argued that contesting a fine does not automatically suspend the obligation to pay it, and that Gold FM had not sought a court-ordered suspension of payment. That position is legally defensible. It is also, in the context of shutting down a functioning broadcaster, breathtakingly rigid.

The Realitatea Plus case is more procedurally documented but no less troubling in its outcome. The station had 28 unpaid fines from 2024 totaling 605,000 lei. It had paid its 2025 fines, proof of payment submitted to CNA on February 14, 2026, but the 2024 batch remained outstanding.

CNA member Mircea Toma noted during the session that the institution had warned Realitatea as far back as February to settle its debts. The station’s legal representative, attorney Ioan Georgescu, initially told the council that the fines had been paid. CNA gave Realitatea an hour’s grace, from 1pm to 2pm, to produce proof of payment. What arrived after that pause were payment orders for some of the fines, dated that same day. The fines had not been paid before; they were being paid in real time, under threat of closure, while the council waited.

That said, the proper response to a broadcaster paying fines, even belatedly, even embarrassingly, is not to shut it down the same afternoon. The purpose of enforcement mechanisms is compliance, not elimination. If Realitatea Plus was making payments, however tardily, a regulator committed to proportionality would weigh that against the irreversible act of pulling a broadcast license.

Two CNA members, Georgică Severin and Lucian Dindirică, withdrew from the vote. Severin had argued during the session that a matter this grave deserved more deliberation time, that the legal arguments presented to the council had arrived too recently to be properly assessed, and that changing enforcement practice without adequate discussion was inappropriate. He was right. His withdrawal was not a defense of GOLD FM or Realitatea, it was a defense of a LEGAL, due process. The remaining seven members voted unanimously for revocation.

CNA has done this before. In 2013, it withdrew the license of OTV, Dan Diaconescu’s television station, for the same reason: fines unpaid over multiple years. That decision was not widely mourned, as OTV was a genuinely chaotic outlet whose programming frequently breached basic standards. But the mechanism used was identical to Tuesday’s decisions, and mechanisms do not change character based on the quality of the outlet they are applied to.

If Romanian law leaves no room for proportionality, no mechanism for installment plans, no formal warning procedure with binding deadlines, no judicial review requirement before a license is pulled…then the law is badly designed. The answer to that problem is legislative reform, not celebration of the law’s blunt application against two outlets on the same afternoon.

Gold FM is a radio station with a clear editorial identity, owned by a figure with visible political opinions. Neither them or Realitatea were neutral outlets, and neither claimed to be. In a functioning media ecosystem, plurality means tolerating voices you disagree with, not just those that share your assumptions.

Romania has spent years trying to strengthen its media independence credentials within the European Union. Tuesday’s decisions hand critics of that record a significant piece of evidence. Two broadcasters closed in one session, one of them without what its owner describes as adequate prior notice, both on administrative grounds that were applied with apparent rigidity and speed.

What is in dispute here is whether closing two stations in an afternoon, permanently, immediately, with no apparent mechanism for appeal before the closure takes effect, represents the kind of enforcement a democracy should be comfortable with.

The answer is no. Romania’s press freedom record does not need another entry in the wrong column. Tuesday added two.

By I. Constantin