This report documents the persistent pattern of human rights abuse in Romania in the 1980s, a period in which the authorities have imprisoned their critics and jailed hundreds of other men and women for wanting to exercise their rights to leave the country. Some prisoners of conscience have been tortured or beaten and jailed for years after unfair trials, while other critics of the government have been put under house arrest, have lost their jobs and then being charged with “parasitism”, or being attacked in the street by thugs believed to be acting for the authorities.
