EdLaw
Romania — Legea nr. 198/2023 (legea învățământului preuniversitar)
Romania's pre-university education act (Monitorul Oficial nr. 613 of 5 July 2023), replacing the 2011 education law. The whole act runs to 252 articles; four are reproduced here, being the ones an EdTech question reaches for — online and hybrid delivery, audio-video surveillance of school spaces, the Ministry's digital-transformation machinery, and the integrated school-management system with its electronic catalogue.
The statute text is reproduced in Romanian, the authentic language — see LEGEA-198-2023.md. The selection criterion is set out in that document's Meta section.
Applicability to EdTech
Romania is unusual in this corpus: the data-protection duties that reach a supplier arrive mostly through procurement and platform standards, not through operator duties written at vendors. There is no Romanian SOPIPA. What there is instead is a statutory architecture a product has to fit into.
A minimum IT standard is a legal precondition, not a tender preference. Art. 132(5) requires strategic platform development to comply with the standardul informatic minim for the development, administration and interoperability of platforms handling educational data — adopted by Government decision, and expressly tied to Legea 242/2022 (the national interoperability platform), to data-protection law, and to full technical, semantic and syntactic interoperability. Art. 132(4) then provides that the list of digital education platforms meeting the minimum qualitative, technical and security criteria is approved by order of the Minister. A product that is not on that list, or cannot meet the standard, is outside the procurement route for the strategic platforms.
UESMATD is the counterparty for integration. Art. 132(2) creates the Unitatea Executivă pentru Suport, Mentenanță și Asistență Tehnică pentru Digitalizare, and (4) puts integration, development and maintenance of the Ministry's strategic platforms in its hands.
Joint liability for confidentiality. Art. 132(9) makes the Ministry jointly liable ("răspunde solidar") for the confidentiality of personal data in the strategic platform databases, together with every other institution with access. (10) applies the GDPR and Legea 190/2018 to the data collected; (11) requires an inter-ministerial protocol, GDPR-compliant, before any database is made interoperable with another; (12) pushes open-data publication under Legea 179/2022.
The school-records system is cloud-based by statute. Art. 133(1) defines the Sistemul integrat de management al școlarității as cloud computing interconnected with public and/or private clouds, and (2) makes the electronic catalogue — the class register — an application running on cloud infrastructure. (3) requires the digital educational portfolio; (4) requires real-time APIs for verifying student and baccalaureate-graduate status; (6) imposes the once-only principle across school and university systems.
Surveillance is permitted and tightly conditioned. Any product touching classroom video in Romania meets Art. 66 rather than the GDPR alone.
Key obligations at a glance
Audio-video surveillance of school spaces (Art. 66)
- Installation needs the simple majority agreement of parents/legal representatives of minor pupils, adult pupils and staff — (1); in exceptional cases of elevated violence risk, information of data subjects suffices — (2).
- The decision is taken by the consiliu de administrație for at most one calendar year, renewable — (3).
- The school carries GDPR responsibility, including processing and storage periods, erasure, security, preventing dissemination into public space, access conditions and informing data subjects — (5).
- Cameras must be closed-circuit and not configurable or reachable from outside the school — (6)(b); a monitoring officer and a data protection officer must be designated — (6)(c); recordings are kept 30 days — (6)(d).
- Recordings may not be used to appraise teachers or to resolve challenges to pupil assessment — (6)(e) — and may not be sold or made public — (8).
- Viewing only, on a written reasoned request approved by the head teacher, by an enumerated list of persons — (9).
Online and hybrid delivery (Art. 18)
- Teaching, learning and assessment take place in the school space as a rule — (1).
- Online or hybrid delivery is available for a determinate period under a state of emergency, alert or siege, or whenever the Ministry so decides at the school's request with the county inspectorate's opinion — (2). It is not a standing option.
Contents
| Document | Covers |
|---|---|
| LEGEA-198-2023.md | Articolele 18, 66, 132 și 133 in full, in Romanian |
Not extracted, but worth knowing
Art. 67(12) imposes a confidentiality duty on school staff over information about a pupil's economic, social and family situation — it sits inside a twelve-alineat article on inclusive education, so it is cited rather than reproduced. Ordinul nr. 3.781 of 15 April 2025 approves the procedure for audio-video monitoring under Art. 66 and is the operational layer beneath it; it is not in this corpus.
Licence
The corpus reproduces four articles of Legea nr. 198/2023 from the Portal Legislativ of the Ministerul Justiției (base document, amendments integrated in place).
Romanian copyright law places official legislative texts outside copyright. Articolul 9 of Legea nr. 8/1996 privind dreptul de autor și drepturile conexe (Portal Legislativ — Legea nr. 8/1996, read 2026-10-01 in the Internet Archive's id_ capture of 2026-07-14, because the portal refuses this network) provides: "Nu pot beneficia de protecția legală a dreptului de autor următoarele: [...] b) textele oficiale de natură politică, legislativă, administrativă, judiciară și traducerile oficiale ale acestora;"
Conditions: none attach to the statute text, because no copyright subsists in it. The corpus still identifies its source: each extracted provision carries a {.meta} provenance line, and Sources here links the official text (the Portal Legislativ). The changes (the selection of provisions, the Markdown layout and the added anchors) are described in Meta. The corpus does not claim that the publisher endorses it, and only the officially promulgated text is authentic.
Related
- Legea nr. 190/2018 — the GDPR implementing act Art. 132(10) applies to data collected in the strategic platforms
- Legea nr. 506/2004 — electronic communications confidentiality
- GDPR — invoked directly by Art. 66(5)
- Poland — Prawo oświatowe — the same article-selection method applied to the Polish education act